The ME2600 Linux Driver

I developed a device driver for the Meilhaus I/O board to work with Linux (kernel versions newer than 2.2.x including 2.4.x). The driver supports the analog to digital converter, the digital to analog converter as well as the digital input and output ports of the device. At this time the driver is mainly used at a lab experiment to stabilize a triple inverted pendulum and an automatic control system for inland navigation.

Meanwhile Meilhaus provides its own Linux driver for this card. The Meilhaus driver covers all the features of the Windows drivers and you probably wants to use their driver instead of this one.

An other interesting project supporting the me2600 is COMEDI that is even supporting real-time Linux.

News

2003-06-06 The device driver has been completely redesigned for better support of high sampe rates and a more Unix-like read/write/ioctl interface. It has been tested extensively in-house and is now available from CVS. A release package will follow as soon as the documentation matches the current software state. You can get more information about the features of the device driver here

License

The driver itself is licensed under the GPL however, a firmware dump is included that is copyright protected by Meilhaus. The exact license information is included in the package and you should read it there. But basically it states as long as you use the driver in an application together with an original me2600 board there should be no problem for you.

Note:

The GPL makes sure that derived work must be put under the GPL as well. I do not consider the mere usage of the driver as derived work. Therefore, you can even use it as part of a commercial product if you like.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Meilhaus GmbH for providing example driver and documentation for the Linux-driver development.

Flyn Marquardt did some modifications to make the driver compile under Alpha-Linux.

Download

The driver is only available as source code because I cannot provide precompiled binaries for all kernel versions. You will find the most recent files on the projects CVS Repository. The projects CVS page gives information about the cvs commands to apply. The last stable release is usually provided for download as a tar.gz ball. You can also download the daily CVS snapshot as a tar ball from here.

Installation and Documentation

Currently, there is an english README describing the installation of this driver.

The programming interface is only documented in English. However, if you have some basic C programming knowledge you should simply use the example as a start for your project.

Feedback

Although the driver has been available since 1999, I have only heard of one other user. So, I would like to know if anybody out there is really interested in it. If you are, please drop me a short line.

Questions

Source Forge provides a discussion forum for every project. Please address any questions to this forum. If you don't get an answer within some days write to driescher(at)mpi-magdeburg(dot)mpg(dot)de.