New CompactRIO Systems for High-Volume Machines and Devices
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Moving from a prototype to a fully deployed system is a challenge when building machines and devices intended for high-volume deployment, such as industrial machinery and medical devices.
Engineers typically use flexible software and hardware tools for rapid prototyping, but they often have to change hardware or build custom hardware when implementing the final deployment system to reduce costs. Unfortunately, making these major changes increases development costs and lengthens time to market when building devices and machines; additionally, it can decrease the quality of the final deployed machine. New problems also can arise when engineers add different hardware and software platforms during deployment that were not originally tested during the prototyping phase. In an ideal environment, engineers and designers would be able to prototype and deploy with the same hardware and software platforms, making the transition from prototyping to deployment faster and more reliable.
Figure 1. The National Instruments standard embedded architecture provides an easy path from prototyping to deployment.
Standard Hardware and Software Architecture Shortens Time to Market and Increases Reliability
To improve the time to market and reliability of machines and devices, National Instruments has created a standard hardware architecture for machine and device builders. With this standard architecture, these engineers can rapidly prototype machines and devices, such as industrial monitoring and control machines, using NI LabVIEW software tools with flexible, high-performance hardware. They can then quickly deploy to cost-optimized hardware, which shares the same architecture, for high-volume applications.
This suite of deployment options from National Instruments extends from high-performance PXI systems to newly released NI cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 products for the CompactRIO platform, which are ideal for high-volume system deployment. This standard embedded architecture combines a floating-point real-time processor, a high-performance field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and a wide variety of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) NI C Series I/O modules. With this standard architecture and LabVIEW graphical tools, going from prototype to deployment has never been easier. Engineers can easily switch between any of these NI deployment platforms by reusing the same LabVIEW code to meet performance requirements or system cost demands, with little or no extra development time or money spent. See page 10 for information on new LabVIEW FPGA software tools and intellectual property (IP) to further reduce development time.
Figure 2. The new cRIO-9072 system, with an integrated real-time controller and FPGA chassis, lowers the cost of CompactRIO for high-volume applications.
The New CompactRIO Systems for High-Volume Applications
NI recently announced a new suite of CompactRIO systems built for high-volume industrial and embedded OEM applications. These new CompactRIO programmable automation controllers (PACs), which include the cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 modules, decrease the price of CompactRIO for high-volume applications. Because the new cRIO-907x products share the same architecture as traditional PXI reconfigurable I/O (RIO), PC RIO, and CompactRIO systems, engineers can use them to reduce the hardware costs of their final deployed machines or devices without spending time and money migrating to another hardware platform or changing software.
To reduce the cost of CompactRIO for high-volume applications, NI engineers designed the new cRIO-907x modules as an integrated system, with the embedded real-time processor and FPGA chip on the same printed circuit board (PCB) rather than on multiple PCBs. This change reduced the manufacturing and labor costs of these new CompactRIO systems, specifically for high-volume OEM applications.
The new CompactRIO systems provide machine builders with the same high-performance architecture of CompactRIO but with a lower price point for higher-volume deployment applications. Because of the lower price, there are trade-offs between the new systems and traditional CompactRIO controllers and chassis. For example, the new cRIO-907x products have a smaller temperature range (-20 to 55 °C compared to -40 to 70 °C), no USB port, a smaller power supply voltage range (single 19 to 30 VDC compared to dual 9 to 35 VDC), and less flexibility – engineers cannot mix and match controllers and chassis.
Table 1. This table compares the features of the two new cRIO-907x systems.
An Easy Transition from Prototyping to Deployment
Traditionally, transitioning from the prototyping phase to the deployment phase when building high-volume machines and devices has been difficult and time consuming. Using LabVIEW tools with the common high-performance architecture of National Instruments hardware deployment platforms, including the new cRIO-907x systems for CompactRIO, there is now an easy solution for moving from prototyping to deployment for high-volume applications.
Todd Dobberstein is the CompactRIO product manager. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Kansas State University.
Learn more about pricing and specifications for the new CompactRIO systems.
This article first appeared in the Q4 2007 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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