Triggering Magstim Rapid with a PCMCIA card

[EJ Nikelski]

Hi David and List,

    Thanks for the info David (and Yan).  Yup, upon reading the 
documentation for the NI-DAQ PCMCIA card, it looks like it's quite 
straight-forward to write to the port. My only concern is that they 
mention that before writing to the card, the card must be activated 
using Card Services ... and they give precious little detail on how this 
might be done outside of their LabView environment.

    I rummaged through the archives and noticed that in June/2006, 
Brandon Cernicky polled users on their experiences using DAQ cards. 
Brandon, did you get any responses? Should I expect any problems 
activating the DAQCard-DIO-24 under E-Prime? How would one generally go 
about this? Any information would be very helpful.

    Finally, I also noticed that Brandon mentioned that the Quatech 
SPP-100 PCMCIA parallel port adapter was the only one shown to work 
correctly under E-Prime. Is this still the case? Is anyone using a 
different parallel port adapter with E-Prime successfully? Is the 
Quatech device reliable?

Thanks for the feedback.

-Jim



David Hairston wrote:
> I do not have specific experience with that NI-DAQ card.
> However, with most DAC cards, you can access the ports directly via a
> memory address, which is assigned via a Windows utility.
> If you can get a memory address for each port, then you are fine to use
> E-Prime. Al lyou have to do is use the WritePort command, but with the
> address for your card and its respective ports.
> For example, 
> WritePort &h378, 1
> Just sends a "1" to whatever device "lives" at hexadecimal address 378.
> Just change this value to match the card, and it *should* work.
> 
> Good luck
> Dave
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: eprime at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:eprime at mail.talkbank.org] On
> Behalf Of EJ Nikelski
> Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 2:14 PM
> To: eprime at mail.talkbank.org
> Subject: Triggering Magstim Rapid with a PCMCIA card
> 
> Hi all,
> 
>     I have just inherited a Magstim Rapid that I will be triggering with
> 
> E-Prime. Problem is that I'll be running E-Prime from a relatively new 
> laptap that has neither serial nor parallel ports. I do, however, have 
> USB, and PCMCIA.
> 
>     I've been following discussions on this list and note that most 
> people seem to use the parallel port to send a TTL trigger pulse. So, I 
> could buy a PCMCIA parallel port card and try to use that. Does anyone 
> have any experience with this?
> 
>     Alternatively, the previous owner used a National Instruments 
> DAQCard-DIO-24 PCMCIA card, which provides 24 TTL-capable I/O lines, 
> however, I'm not sure how compatible this card is with E-Prime. National
> 
> Instruments appears to sell LabView, and so that's really all they 
> recommend. I suppose the greatest advantage of this option is that it 
> provides me with lots of input and output channels (when compared to 
> using a parallel port). Does anyone have any experience using this NI 
> DAQ card (or any other) with E-Prime? Any recommendations would be 
> appreciated.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -Jim
> 
> 
>