NI Expands RIO Chassis Offerings

National Instruments's NI 9157 and NI 9159 MXI-Express RIO chassis and NI 9148 Ethernet RIO chassis, which in addition to the existing NI 9144 EtherCAT chassis, extend the company's offering of high-channel-count expansion chassis on a variety of buses. Built on NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology, these chassis deliver the benefits of field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware and C Series I/O to applications requiring hundreds, or even thousands, of channels. Each expansion chassis contains a Xilinx FPGA that is programmable with the NI LabVIEW FPGA Module, giving engineers the flexibility of high-speed and customizable I/O timing, inline processing and control.

The new MXI-Express RIO 14-slot expansion chassis with onboard Virtex-5 FPGAs offer a high-end solution for large applications that require high channel counts, mixed I/O for a variety of measurements and custom signal processing and control algorithms. The MXI-Express link delivers high bandwidth for streaming data to and from multiple chassis from a single controller, offering hundreds of C Series module slots and thousands of channels of analog, digital and communication I/O including strain, acceleration, channel-to-channel isolated voltage input and simultaneous voltage. The new chassis are ideal for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, industrial machine monitoring and complex research applications.

The NI 9148 8-slot Ethernet expansion chassis adds flexible distributed I/O to RIO systems. With standard CAT 5 Ethernet cabling, it communicates with NI CompactRIO, real-time PXI controllers, the NI industrial controller or any networked Windows PC. The flexibility of the NI 9148 chassis makes it an ideal choice for seamlessly adding expansion I/O to an existing network. With an onboard FPGA and LabVIEW FPGA software, engineers can implement custom signal analysis, control and safety interlocks local to each chassis to create a truly modular system. Engineers also can use more than 50 third-party C Series I/O modules with these new chassis, including wireless modules based on 802.11, GPS, Edge, and other technologies. When combining the new NI 9148 Ethernet chassis with wireless modules from S.E.A. Datentechnik GmbH, engineers can turn the NI 9148 chassis into wireless expansion systems for application with difficult or impossible cabling.

These expansion chassis are an extension of the NI RIO platform, which delivers a wide variety of solutions at different prices and performance levels for control, design and test applications. The common NI RIO architecture consists of a processor, customizable FPGA and modular I/O, which combine to create a flexible system that solves complex application problems. Engineers can use the LabVIEW graphical development environment to program the processor, FPGA and I/O of their RIO system to create an embedded system that rivals the performance and optimization of custom hardware.

NI 9157 and NI 9159 MXI-Express RIO chassis

NI 9148 Ethernet RIO chassis

National Instruments

RELATED ARTICLES
DAQ Platform Delivers High-speed, Distributed Sensor Measurements

NI Announces Camera Link, Windows 7 Support for Embedded Systems Offering

NI Advances IEEE 802.11n Wireless LAN Test

NI PXI Express Quad-Core Controller Utilizes Intel Core i7 Processor

National Instruments Donates RM1.9 Million Worth of Virtual Instrumentation Platform to Multimedia University