DT321 ADC/DIO board won't work after power-up until Win10 is rebooted

[DCornish]

Tech support:

I have installed a new DT321-PBF ADC/DIO board in a Win10 x64 Enterprise LTSC machine with an I7-9700E CPU and 32G of RAM.

Per Device Manager, the driver is DT300K_x64.sys version 6.7.4.1 dated 8/03/2010, and I am using QuickDAQ Standard Edition 3.7.0.49 for testing in addition to my VIsual Studio 2019 application code.

After a power-up, neither my application code nor QuickDAQ works with the DT321. In QuickDAQ, the board can be found using Configuration/Device Selection, but after I configure it to capture 8 channels, dashes are displayed in the Channel Display tab after I press the View button and no data is taken.

However, if I shut down QuickDAQ and restart Windows, everything works as expected.

Any ideas? I'm sure my customer would consider it inconvenient to re-boot the PC after turning it on before he can acquire data.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Dave Cornish

[DCornish]

Hi Fausto,

Thanks for your response. Our previous computers were Advantech Core 2 Duos running 32-bit WinXP SP3, but knowing that doesn't really help very much.

This afternoon, I found the root cause of the problem, and I'm letting you know so you can forward the solution to other customers using old Data Translation hardware in new Win10 machines.

You will recall that none of my three DT-321 boards would acquire ADC data after a power-up or hard reset (red button), but they all worked fine after a system restart (Start>Power>Restart). I experimented with using Device Manager to disable and re-enable the DT321 device driver after a power-up, and doing so also fixed the problem without requiring a system restart.

While researching how to write a PowerShell script to perform a disable/enable cycle on the DT321 device driver, I found a post from another user whose hardware also wouldn't work after a power-up or hard reset, and he had discovered that disabling the Win10 fast startup feature cured his problem. I then tried disabling Win10 fast startup on my new computers, and this solution worked for me as well.

As it turns out, Win10 fast startup performs a mini system hibernation at shutdown, and it works well for modern devices that support hibernation mode at the device driver level. My guess is that the DT-321 is too old to support hibernation mode in any form, so its operation is negatively affected when the fast startup feature is enabled.

TL;DR for Data Translation boards that don't work after power-up or a hard reset:

   1. Suggest a system restart, and if the board works after the restart,

   2. Suggest disabling the Win10 fast startup feature.

Thanks again for your help, and let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

DaveC

[Fausto]

Hello @DCornish.

The DT321 PCI board may be incompatible with your system and/or its configuration.  In the system BIOS, try changing the BIOS Mode to Legacy, if set to UEFI.  Also, if Secure Boot State is enabled, try disabling that mode.

If it's not possible to change your current system, can you test the board with another system and these BIOS changes?

Regards,

Fausto

[DCornish]

Hi Fausto,

Thanks very much for your response!

Unfortunately, my PC's BIOS does not have the option to boot in Legacy mode, so I must use UEFI mode. I do have two more identical PCs and DT-321 boards that I will be configuring within the next week or two, so I can see if the problem occurs with more than one PC.

I have done some experimenting with my Visual Studio 2019 application code, and the DT-321 does actually respond to most functions after a power-up without requiring a re-boot. I have written code to set and verify (read back) the following configuration settings:

• Port A "single value" mode
• Port B "single value" mode
• ADC continuous "post trigger" mode
• ADC differential input mode
• ADC 16-bit conversion mode
• ADC +/-10 Vdc input mode
• ADC channel list with 8 A/D inputs (channels 0 to 7) and the DIO input (channel 16)
• ADC clock source internal
• ADC clock source 300000.0 Hz
• ADC external digital trigger
• ADC triggered scan
• ADC scan per trigger
• ADC external digital re-trigger
• ADC one scan per trigger
• ADC callback function
• ADC buffer wrap enabled

I have also defined and queued 16 buffers of 64 bytes each in the the ADC, which is sufficient to handle my maximum trigger rate of 2048 Hz without a buffer overflow. After setting and verifying the above configuration, my code loads the ADC subsystem configuration and starts it.

After power-up all of this works, except that the ADC never triggers and it doesn't capture data with either my code or with QuickDAQ. I should note that the DIO Port A input DOES work with my code after power-up, so the DT-321 hardware isn't completely non-responsive. As I mentioned previously, rebooting the PC cures the problem.

To me, this doesn't feel like a BIOS/UEFI compatibility issue;  instead, it suggests that some of the DT-321 ADC hardware isn't being properly initialized by the OLDAAPI drivers on power-up. Is it possible that the drivers have a latent issue that appears when they are used with Win10 X64?

Thanks in advance for your assistance,

Dave C

[DCornish]

Hi Fausto,

I now have three identical Win10 computers, and all three have the same issue driver issue with the installed DT-321 boards.

You don't need my VS2019 software to observe the problem, because the DT-321s fail to collect analog data after a power-up using the factory QuickDAQ utility. Only after performing a Start/Power/Restart do the boards start working, and afterward they seem fine.

I can really use your help on this one. Do your or someone else in tech support have time to take a look?

Thanks in advance,

Dave C

Edited July 5, 2023 by DCornish

[Fausto]

Hello @DCornish.

The driver's digital signature has not been updated for this board, which may be part of the issue.  You have confirmed that the DT321 board does not work correctly with that particular system model.  Do you have other Windows systems to test with the DT321 boards?

What system (make/model) and Windows OS did you and/or the customer use previously?

Regards,

Fausto