Prototyping hardware

National Instruments has released a suite of prototyping hardware so that engineers and scientists can prototype industrial and embedded projects faster.

The five CompactRIO reconfigurable chassis feature a Xilinx Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array, the largest and fastest FPGA available today in NI hardware.

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, along with LabVIEW graphical programming tools, is suitable for engineers and start-up companies prototyping industrial and embedded projects within areas such as renewable energy, medical device design and robotics.

With graphical system design tools, engineers can use a single, high-level graphical programming tool with off-the-shelf hardware including FPGAs, processors and I/O to design and prototype a project faster and with lower development costs.

The reconfigurable chassis combined with the LabVIEW FPGA module helps engineers use FPGA technology with off-the-shelf hardware for rapid prototyping without custom hardware design.

Additionally, LabVIEW FPGA technology features hundreds of pre-built graphical intelligent property blocks for signal processing, communication protocols, control and interfacing to analog and digital I/O as well as the ability to integrate existing VHDL code or IP for even faster development.

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 for connectivity to a variety of digital and analog sensors and actuators during the prototyping process.

The controller is programmed with the LabVIEW Real-Time Module that provides more than 600 built-in function blocks for quick implementation of floating-point signal processing and control operations, data logging and communication as well as the ability to integrate existing ANSI C/C++ code.