Reconfigurable I/O system aids machine control

Engineers can quickly design, prototype and deploy the customisable, commercial off-the-shelf hardware systems for embedded machine control and data acquisition.

The new NI cRIO-9072 and cRIO-9074 CompactRIO systems give engineers and machine builders an ideal solution for rapidly deploying industrial machines at high volume.

These new National Instruments 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 customisable, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware systems for embedded machine control and data acquisition systems using the National Instruments LabView graphical development environment, eliminating the need for spending unnecessary time and money designing custom embedded hardware for high-volume deployment.

The new 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 powerful floating-point processor, a reconfigurable FPGA and I/O modules.

This standard architecture helps improve the time to market and reliability of machines and embedded devices for machine builders.

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

Because engineers can reuse the same LabView code during prototyping and deployment, they are able to shorten time to market and increase machine reliability.

One example of the efficiency engineers can gain with these systems is Sanarus Medical, which used CompactRIO to create the Visica2 Treatment System that fights breast cancer by providing office-based cryoablation treatment for biopsy-proven breast fibroadenomas.

The Visica2 system uses cryoablation to destroy targeted fibroadenomas through a 3mm incision, under ultrasound guidance, without requiring sutures or general anaesthesia to offer women a minimally invasive alternative to the standard surgical treatment for such tumours.

"The CompactRIO embedded system and LabView graphical tools from National Instruments gave us the power to design, prototype and deploy the control system within our Visica2 medical device quickly and beat our time to market goals while saving money by eliminating the need for building custom hardware", says Jeff Stevens, Principal Systems Engineer at Sanarus Medical.

"The standard embedded RIO [reconfiguarable I/O] architecture and new low-cost hardware like the cRIO-907x systems help us even further by allowing us to quickly move to lower-cost hardware when deploying our machines at high volume without having to redesign software or start over from scratch with a new design".

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 new cRIO-9072 integrated system combines an industrial 266MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 1Mgate FPGA chip.

The new NI cRIO-9074 integrated system contains a 400MHz real-time processor and an eight-slot chassis with an embedded, reconfigurable 3M gate FPGA chip.

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