Can Labview DAQ work on a self-triggering basis?

[bbentelin]

Currently I have the following setup:

We shoot electrons through a diamond (which is attached to a electronics board via electrodes), then the electrons pass through a scintillator.  We use the scintillator/phototube as the trigger pulse right now, but I want to be able to instead trigger on the diamond itself.  Is it possible to self trigger?

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[NIquist]

What do you mean "trigger on the diamond itself"???  Of course you can have labview trigger a collection at any time you desire.  You could pre-trigger the collect and then start your process.

It might help if I could try this myself.  Just mail me the diamond and we'll get started...

[bbentelin]

Are you saying to split the pulse coming out of the electronics board, putting one into the signal slot, and the other into the trigger slot?

[NIquist]

If the board connected to the diamond outputs a pulse and the pulse is what you want to measure then sure, you could wire it to both the analog input and also your trigger channel.  You can set up various trigger conditions.  If the pulse is TTL (or close), you use digital triggering.  If it's an analog signal, you can set the threshold and other parameters to control triggering.

There are many ways to control DAQ triggering.  Have you checked out the examples that ship with labview?  Open the Example Finder (Help>Find Examples...) and search for 'trigger'.  That should give you some ideas to get started.