US Digital

The PCI-4E is a PCI interface card designed to track up to four incremental encoders. Multiple cards can be used concurrently on the same PCI bus of a PC to track additional encoders. Each encoder channel has a 24-bit real time up/down counter with a count range from 0 to 16,777,215.

The PCI-3E is available for applications where an I/O port and only three incremental encoders are desired (see the PCI-3E page).

The PCI-4E provides fast efficient encoder position counters for real-time data acquisition applications. A console application written in C running on a PC with a 1.8 GHz processor and Windows 2000 may potentially store up to 150,000 samples per second to a data array, each sample consisting of the four 24-bit encoder position counters and a 33 MHz time stamp. Please note: Due to how Microsoft Windows handles CPU time and processes the sampling rate may periodically drop.

Four counting modes can be selected, including modulo-N, non-recycle, range-limit and simple 24 bit counter mode. Quadrature input modes of x1, x2, x4 and pulse/direction can be selected.

Two versions are available: the single-ended PCI-4E-S for TTL inputs or the differential PCI-4E-D for RS-422 quadrature inputs.

The plug-and-play software automatically detects the existence of one or more PCI-4E cards on the PCI bus and assigns a unique device ID to each card. Demo software is available in Windows 98/ME and Windows 2000/XP. The software displays the position of each encoder and allows the user to change the parameters of each channel individually. This demo software includes the source code and provides a good starting point for the development of user customizable software. LabVIEW users are also provided with the LabVIEW driver software and application.