In reading this thread, I haven't seen any discussion of the
appropriateness of NI's technology for various situations. I can see that
it is probably a Good Thing for someone with a factory or a big scientific
installation (like a particle accelerator) where there are multiple points
that must be monitored and possibly controlled. But is is appropriate for
the scientist who has a single, relatively small setup? A single apparatus,
a single-cell patch-clamp setup? The sort of situation that requires just a
single DAQ board and not a huge amount a data (you know, 100's of kBytes
per second, or data logging at very slow speed).
This situation describes most of our customers pretty well. We sell Igor
Pro with an add-on DAQ component that depends on NI's C-language libraries,
which they have no plans to port to OS X. I don't think attempting to
support the RT hardware would pay back for us, as it would require
considerable reverse engineering.
