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Stand-alone Crio System

Hi I am trying to configure a Stand-alone Crio System and I am trying to get technical confirmation and reference material on the below points:

1. Is it possible to use Touch Displays with Crio & How?

2. If yes, suggest NI & Third-party Touch Displays

3. Are there any limitations on the GUI or size of the code in terms of memory? if yes what?

4. Is it possible to connect a network switch and/or USB Hub to the crio and expand it to connect to LAN servers for data storage or use it to control other ethernet devices like Programmable Power Supplies?

 

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1) yes in a number of ways. First the higher end cRIOs like the 903x and 904x have a Display Port mini connector. You can directly connect any display with Display Port connection to it. For the Touch Panel part you would have to have USB support that provides the touch panel output as a USB HID resource. You will most likely also need an according Linux driver for that to have full support for the touch panel functionality but it may be possible to get something usable if your touch panel interface supports USB HID emulation as mouse device.

This however won't work for the lower level ARM based cRIOs. These do not only not have a Display Port connector but also no internal support for a GUI in an form and hence can't display the front panels of VIs even if you manage to hack in some display interface.

The other option would require you to directly interface to a display through some programming interface like I2C or similar and do the entire display management yourself from within your LabVIEW program. This likely is not an option for any useful application and only mentioned here for technical completeness.

 

2) NI used to have their own touchpanel devices, but they were technically intelligent controllers with their own CPU and in fact simply another potential target to deploy LabVIEW programs to, very similar to a cRIO. Nowadays they seem to only sell touch panels alone: https://www.ni.com/nl-nl/shop/category/hmis-and-displays.html

 

3) Only the 903x (not yet discontinued but priced since some time higher than the according 904x models with more memory) and the 904x (as Display Port capable USB C) have Display Port connectors and only the x64 based cRIO controllers support front panel display (through virtual display solutions such as VPN for instance).

 

4) yes, they offer one or often two full featured 10/100M/1G Ethernet ports that can be connected to any compatible network hardware including of course hubs and all sorts of devices.

Rolf Kalbermatter
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Here are some additional considerations for the UI on an RT target. I'm not sure how up to date everything is because it lists subpanels as not supported but I'm working on a project right now where we're doing that (the program doesn't work when run interactively using subpanels so that may be the unsupported aspect).

 

https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/labview-real-time-module/page/design-considerations-for-display...

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