Using NI DAQ hardware with a Mac

Plenty of engineers work on Macs and plenty of labs are full of National Instruments hardware: cDAQ chassis, USB-6000 series devices, PXI systems. The two don’t meet directly anymore. NI-DAQmx, the driver every modern NI DAQ device depends on, does not support macOS.

NI did ship a Mac option for years, NI-DAQmx Base. According to NI’s own compatibility page, its last version was 15.0 and it is compatible with macOS 10.14 and earlier. The product has reached end of life, so it is not a path forward on a current Mac.

That leaves four realistic setups.

1. Boot Camp on an Intel Mac

If you still have an Intel Mac, Boot Camp runs Windows natively and NI-DAQmx installs as it would on any PC. It works, but it means rebooting to take a measurement, and Apple Silicon Macs don’t support Boot Camp at all.

2. A Windows virtual machine

A VM with USB passthrough can work on an Intel Mac. On Apple Silicon you are running the ARM edition of Windows, and NI-DAQmx is built for x86 Windows, so check NI’s current support notes carefully before you buy hardware or plan a test around this. Network-attached chassis avoid USB passthrough but still need the driver running somewhere it is supported.

3. Remote desktop into a bench PC

Keep a Windows PC next to the hardware, run NI’s software there and remote in from your Mac. This is dependable and it is what many labs do. The friction is that the data, the configuration and the charts all live on the other machine. Live plots over remote desktop are laggy, and pulling files back for analysis becomes a chore.

4. Stream the hardware to your Mac with DAQAtlas Bridge

DAQAtlas Bridge, in development alongside DAQAtlas, is a small command-line agent that runs on a Windows PC or a supported Linux machine next to the NI hardware. It uses NI-DAQmx locally, where the driver is supported, and serves the devices to DAQAtlas over the network. On your Mac, the NI channels appear in the device list beside everything else. You configure them, chart them and record them in DAQAtlas, and the files land on your Mac.

The bridge also serves any other backend it can load, so the same agent can share MCC devices from a Linux PC or Raspberry Pi, or LabJack and Digilent hardware attached to another computer. NI-DAQmx itself doesn’t run on a Raspberry Pi, so NI hardware needs a Windows or Linux PC.

A few setup notes. The bridge listens on TCP port 47811 and announces itself on UDP 47810, so open those on the bench machine’s firewall. Run it on a network you trust or over a VPN, and give it a token with --token so only your copy of DAQAtlas can connect.

Which setup should you pick?

• One-off measurement on an Intel Mac: Boot Camp.
• NI hardware that stays on one bench and one person uses it: remote desktop is fine.
• NI hardware alongside MCC, LabJack or Digilent devices, or a team on Macs: the bridge keeps everything in one recording on the machine you actually work on.

DAQAtlas is in development and opening to beta testers. If NI hardware is the reason you still keep a Windows laptop on your desk, sign up and tell us which devices you run. It shapes what we test first.