National Instruments Introduces Single-Board RIO Platform

“NI Single-Board RIO delivered all the components we needed for a reliable, high performance embedded system on a single device, which streamlined development and drastically reduced costs,” said Jeremy Snow, President at Ventura Aerospace, which has deployed the devices in a fire suppression system for FedEx Express. “We were able to start with LabVIEW and CompactRIO for prototyping and quickly migrate our code to the new NI Single-Board RIO for deployment – all in less than a year.”

NI Single-Board RIO devices expand the NI FPGA-based deployment platform offering which includes PXI, PC and the NI CompactRIO embedded control and data acquisition system that share the NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture. The NI RIO architecture is composed of a real-time processor, FPGA and I/O modules. Using this standard architecture and LabVIEW, engineers and scientists can rapidly design and prototype advanced control and embedded devices on hardware such as CompactRIO and deploy their systems to the lower-cost CompactRIO integrated systems or the new NI Single-Board RIO devices to reduce deployment costs. Because engineers and scientists can program all NI RIO technology platforms with LabVIEW, no recoding is needed when transitioning from prototype to deployment, which increases system reliability and shortens development time.

NI Single-Board RIO devices feature an industrial 266 MHz or 400 MHz Freescale MPC5200 processor built on Power Architecture technology, the Wind River VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) and Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA. The onboard analogue and digital I/O connects directly to the FPGA to provide low-level customisation of timing and I/O signal processing. Engineers and scientists can also expand the I/O capabilities using the devices’ three expansion slots for connecting any NI C-Series I/O module or custom modules that they develop. There are more than 40 C Series modules for I/O and communication such as acceleration, temperature, power quality, controller-area network (CAN) and motion.

Additionally, the devices offer an operating temperature of -20 to 55 °C for use in thermally rugged applications as well as an integrated 19 to 30 VDC power supply input and real-time clock with battery backup for increased reliability. All the NI Single-Board RIO products are Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) compliant, demonstrating the NI commitment to eliminating certain hazardous substances from products to benefit the environment.