[ltp] OT: usb data capture hardware?

[Richard Neill]

Dear All,

Thank you for your advice. That's been really helpful. To summarise:

The National Instruments devices look rather promising. And they list 
Linux support as a feature, rather than an addon, which is promising.

We originally got burned by purchased a PCI7200 card from adlink which 
claimed "Linux support", but only with binary drivers supplied for 
really obsolete RedHat kernels!

The software radio projects here:
    http://comsec.com/wiki?UniversalSoftwareRadioPeripheral
    http://oscar.dcarr.org/ssrp/
also seem to be a good way to do things - with the particular advantage 
of being open-source.

However, what I didn't know was that the Parallel Port could do 5 
Mbyte/sec in EPP mode. I thought it was limited to about 500kByte.
This is probably the way to go, since it is easiest.
    http://www.fapo.com/1284adv.htm


One more thing which may be relevant to this thread: the DLP-245M
is available from £14, and is ideal for anyone here wanting to do basic 
things with USB-1. It "just works" with Linux.
   http://www.ftdichip.com/FTProducts.htm
   DLP-USB245M-G   £14


Lastly, a rather far-out idea: it's quite easy (apparently) to connect
an IDE disk to a microcontroller. It would be possible to pretend to be 
a disk!  http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/ide/wesley.html


Thanks once again for your help,

Richard

  >
> Richard Neill wrote:
> 
>> Dear All,
>>
>> Please excuse this being slightly off-topic: I thought someone here 
>> may have experience of what I'm trying to do.
>>
>> Basically, I have an astrophysics sensor system which generates a 
>> 16-bit wide output (from an ADC), with a rising-edge clock every time 
>> the output has changed.  The data rate is somewhere between 1-5 MHz, 
>> and I need to get this into a computer.
>