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The LabJack U3 has up to 20 digital I/O channels. 16 are available from the flexible I/O lines, and 4 dedicated digital I/O (CIO0-CIO3) are available on the DB15 connector. The first 4 lines, FIO0-FIO3, are unavailable on the U3-HV. Each digital line can be individually configured as input, output-high, or output-low. The digital I/O use 3.3 volt logic and are 5 volt tolerant.

The LabJackUD driver uses the following bit numbers to specify all the digital lines:

0-7    FIO0-FIO7  (0-3 unavailable on U3-HV)
8-15   EIO0-EIO7
16-19  CIO0-CIO3

The 8 FIO lines appear on the built-in screw-terminals, while the 8 EIO and 4 CIO lines appear only on the DB15 connector. See the DB15 Section of this User’s Guide for more information.

All the digital I/O include an internal series resistor that provides overvoltage/short-circuit protection. These series resistors also limit the ability of these lines to sink or source current. Refer to the specifications in Appendix A.

All digital I/O on the U3 have 3 possible states: input, output-high, or output-low. Each bit of I/O can be configured individually. When configured as an input, a bit has a ~100 kΩ pull-up resistor to 3.3 volts (all digital I/O are 5 volt tolerant). When configured as output-high, a bit is connected to the internal 3.3 volt supply (through a series resistor). When configured as output-low, a bit is connected to GND (through a series resistor).

The power-up condition of the digital I/O can be configured by the user. From the factory, all digital I/O are configured to power-up as inputs. Note that even if the power-up default for a line is changed to output-high or output-low, there is a delay of about 5 ms at power-up where all digital I/O are in the factory default condition.

The low-level Feedback function (Section 5.2.5) writes and reads all digital I/O. For information about using digital I/O under the Windows LabJackUD driver, see Section 4.3.5. See Section 3.1 for timing information.

Many function parameters contain specific bits within a single integer parameter to write/read specific information. In particular, most digital I/O parameters contain the information for each bit of I/O in one integer, where each bit of I/O corresponds to the same bit in the parameter (e.g. the direction of FIO0 is set in bit 0 of parameter FIODir). For instance, in the low-level function ConfigU3, the parameter FIODirection is a single byte (8 bits) that writes/reads the power-up direction of each of the 8 FIO lines:

• if FIODirection is 0, all FIO lines are input,
• if FIODirection is 1 (2⁰), FIO0 is output, FIO1-FIO7 are input,
• if FIODirection is 5 (2⁰ + 2²), FIO0 and FIO2 are output, all other FIO lines are input,
• if FIODirection is 255 (2⁰ + … + 2⁷), FIO0-FIO7 are output.