Use of Range Sensors and Data Acquisition Hardware in MATLAB
<p>I am researching on data transfer from range sensor (Hokuyo UBG-04LX-F01) to matlab directly, using the matlab data acquisition toolbox and I came across the NI-DAQ (data acquisition hardware). Here is what I know so far;</p>

<ol>
<li>Data sent directly to matlab from sensor is usually encoded with ASCII 2 or 3 bit character encoding.</li>
<li>Data acquisition hardware such as the (NI-DAQ 6008) can act as a medium to receive data from sensor and send it to matlab.</li>
</ol>

<p>My question is, Can the data acquisition hardware send real time data from the sensor to matlab?
Is the data sent to matlab decoded, in other words does the data acquisition hardware decode the data to simple normal range or decimal values before sending it to MATLAB? Given its role as the middleman. </p>