How Do I Generate On-Demand Digital Signals On My DAQ Device?

Updated Jan 8, 2019

Reported In


  • LabVIEW Full
  • LabVIEW Base
  • LabVIEW Professional


  • NI-DAQmx

Issue Details

How do I generate on-demand digital signals on my DAQ device?


If your DAQ device has digital output lines, you can use the DAQmx API to perform digital out tasks.

We cannot perform continuous generation on a device that is only capable of on-demand output. To perform on-demand digital output, we have a couple options:

1. DAQ Assistant 

Place down a DAQ Assistant in your block diagram (Right-Click Block Diagram >> Measurement I/O >> NI DAQmx) and a configuration window should pop up. Click on Generate Signals >> Digital Output >> Either Line Output or Port Output. The DAQ Assistant will output whatever data you wire into its 'data' terminal:
2. DAQmx API

You can also use the DAQmx API to output digital signals. We can specify the specific line on the port and write to it:

Or, we can set an entire port as the output. In this case, we can specify the input as either an array of booleans:

Or an integer: 
The integer will be converted to binary to be written out to the port; in this case all the lines on port 0 will be high except for line 0.