From the course: Data Acquisition with LabVIEW

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Acquisition timing

Acquisition timing

- [Instructor] Acquiring, or sampling, an analog signal is like taking a series of snapshots, measuring a signal's voltage at certain intervals of time. The timing of when those snapshots are taken is very important, and there are two mains types of timing for data acquisition tasks: software-timed and hardware-timed. With software-timed acquisition, the timing and rate at which the samples are acquired is determined by the software and operating system instead of the DAQ device. The program reads samples on demand, one-at-a-time from the DAQ device. When the program requests a new sample, the DAQ device will take a measurement and then return that most recent value. Placing that on-demand read operation inside of a while loop and using a timing function like the millisecond wait VI to control the rate at which that loop executes allows you to sample an input signal at a regular interval. For example, configuring the…

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