National Instruments SC Express family PXI DAQ modules

National Instruments has announced the company’s first data acquisition (DAQ) modules with integrated signal conditioning on PXI Express. The SC Express family offers increased accuracy, high data throughput and synchronisation for measuring strain gauges, bridge-based transducers, thermocouples and high-voltage analog inputs. PXI Express provides 250 MBps of dedicated bandwidth for each SC Express module in the chassis.

The PXIe-4330 24-bit simultaneous bridge input module offers 0.02% and 25 kSps per channel sample rate for high-performance strain, load, force and torque measurements. The bridge input module achieves high accuracy with a ratiometric design where the ADC references the excitation voltage. This approach removes the measurement’s dependence on the stability and accuracy of the excitation voltage.

The PXIe-4353 thermocouple module can measure temperatures with 0.30°C accuracy on 32 channels. The isothermal terminal block minimises error with a design that optimises thermal conductivity, making it possible for the nearby cold-junction compensation thermistors to accurately measure at the thermocouple junctions.

The PXIe-4300 high-voltage isolated analog input module can measure up to 300 V with simultaneous sampling. With a 16-bit ADC per channel and a 250 kSps per channel sampling rate, the module can stream 4 MBps per module and 68 MBps in a single chassis.

The SC Express modules include NI-DAQmx driver software and support for multi-device tasks. The same code that acquires data from one module can synchronise up to 17 modules in a chassis.