Prototyping hardware

National Instruments has announced a suite of prototyping hardware that makes it possible for engineers and scientists to prototype industrial and embedded projects faster, reduce time to market and lower development costs. The five NI CompactRIO reconfigurable chassis feature a Xilinx Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Additionally, the NI cRIO-9022 controller features a Freescale 533 MHz industrial real-time processor that delivers faster real-time processing for time-critical control applications.

This suite of hardware, along with NI LabVIEW graphical programming tools, is designed for engineers and start-up companies prototyping industrial and embedded projects within areas such as renewable energy, medical device design and robotics. This approach makes it possible for small teams of engineers to quickly build a prototype to evaluate and prove the value of their next project

The NI cRIO-911x reconfigurable chassis combined with the LabVIEW FPGA Module helps engineers and scientists take advantage of FPGA technology with off-the-shelf hardware for rapid prototyping without the burden of custom hardware design. Additionally, LabVIEW FPGA technology features hundreds of pre-built graphical intellectual property (IP) blocks. The cRIO-911x chassis are available with four or eight slots that can be filled with any assortment of the more than 65 third-party and NI C Series I/O modules.

The cRIO-9022 controller is programmed with the LabVIEW Real-Time Module, which provides more than 600 built-in function blocks as well as the ability to integrate existing ANSI C/C++ code. The controller features dual ethernet ports and deterministic expansion I/O, which is suitable for high-channel-count applications. The controller also features a high-speed USB port and it connects to any of the four- or eight-slot cRIO-911x chassis.