Labview-> DAQ-> Many Steppers?

[kevinmh]

Hello!

I'm a master's student at Colorado State University and I'm beginning a project that will ultimately involve controlling at least 9 stepper motors independently and concurrently. I think we will only be able to afford to go the route where I buy the stepper motor drivers and motors myself (as opposed to the $20,000 PCI controller/drive/motor set up from NI) and control them ultimately from Labview, which we already have a license for. (I have coded here and there in school, but haven't really put significant time into any language-hence the Labview control.) I'm looking into controlling them from a daq card. It seems that the cheapest route would be to buy multiple 4-axis drivers and control them through cards. So, I'll be controlling at least 3 of these drivers with this architecture.

I'm just wondering if anyone here has tried to control this many motors with DAQ cards, from NI (USB 6501, for example). Was it necessary to use multiple cards? Were they run in parallel from multiple USB ports on the PC, or was some daisychaining needed (or possible)? Will labview be able to handle this "parallel serial" control (multiple USBs at once)? On NI forums there seems to be an issue with not being able to achieve the needed timing through software, so they recommend using the timing on the card. Is there a better (but still cheap) control architecture, given my intents and limitations?

Thanks,

Kevin