NI CompactRIO Systems Enable High-Volume Machines and Devices

By DE Editors

National Instruments (NI;  Austin, TX) released the NI cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 CompactRIO systems that give engineers and machine builders an ideal solution for rapidly deploying industrial machines at high volume.

These CompactRIO systems have an integrated hardware architecture that combines an embedded real-time processor and a reconfigurable FPGA within a single chassis, lowering the cost of CompactRIO for OEM applications. Engineers can quickly design, prototype, and deploy the customizable, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware systems for embedded machine control and data acquisition systems using the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, eliminating the need for spending unnecessary time and money designing custom embedded hardware for high-volume deployment.

The cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 systems extend the family of NI FPGA-based deployment platforms, including PXI, PC, and standard CompactRIO hardware that share a standard embedded hardware architecture combining a floating-point processor, a reconfigurable FPGA, and I/O modules.

Using this standard architecture and LabVIEW tools,  engineers can design and prototype industrial monitoring, and can control machines and embedded devices with flexible, high-performance hardware, as well as deploy to the new cost-optimized cRIO-907x CompactRIO systems quickly to reduce deployment costs.

To reduce the cost of CompactRIO for high-volume applications, NI engineers designed the new cRIO-907x systems as integrated systems, with the embedded real-time processor and FPGA chip on the same printed circuit board (PCB) rather than multiple PCBs as in traditional CompactRIO systems. The cRIO-9072 (priced from $1,999) combines an industrial 266 MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded,  reconfigurable 1M gate FPGA chip. The NI cRIO-9074 (priced from $2,999)  contains a 400MHz real-time processor and an 8-slot chassis with an embedded,  reconfigurable 3M gate FPGA chip.

For specs on the CompactRIO, go to National Instruments at http://www.ni.com/compactrio.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.