Will pre-triggering ever come back to the data acquisition toolbox?

At the Department of Engineering in Cambridge University, we have a number of undergraduate experiments relating to acoustics and vibration, that use Matlab software for data acquisition and analysis. These rely on functionality that was available in the legacy DAQ toolbox, but which was removed in the session-based toolbox: especially the ability to pre-trigger, and transparency to a wide range of different acquisition hardware. To keep these labs going we have to load the 32-bit version of Matlab, which will eventually be withdrawn. We now have to make the decision whether to try to stick with Matlab, or recode the whole package in Python. Is there any prospect in a finite time-scale of restoring the lost functionality in the Matlab toolbox? If we are going to have to code up things like pre-triggering ourselves by low-level code, we might as well go down the open-source route and switch to Python.

Answer 1

[Soma Ardhanareeswaran]

I work for MathWorks and I have forwarded this feedback to the appropriate product team. Our developers are aware of the request and will consider it for a future release of MATLAB.

[Soma Ardhanareeswaran]

Refer to the following link: http://www.mathworks.com/examples/daq/mw/daq_product-software_analog_triggered_data_capture-software-analog-triggered-data-capture

It does not have a trigger delay or pre-trigger capability but it can be modified to support this.

[Caroline Runyan]

I am also wrestling with loss of trigger functionality with the move to the session-based interface. The capabilities for loading data and triggering it in the background are much diminished now. The few narrowly defined examples in the Matlab help documentation fit only a restricted set of scenarios.

Will software triggers return?