cRio Programming without the Real-Time module

[CharlesD3]

If DAQmx is the advanced feature, then what is the basic feature?

I'm running the professional edition of LV 2019; 32-bit and 64-bit.

[CharlesD3]

Exchanging it is certainly not out of the question.  What I really wanted (and thought I was getting) was a smaller, lesser-featured PXi rack.  Do you have handy a link to where I could look into such an exchange?

[JensG69]

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@CharlesD3 wrote:

Exchanging it is certainly not out of the question.  What I really wanted (and thought I was getting) was a smaller, lesser-featured PXi rack.  Do you have handy a link to where I could look into such an exchange?

I suggest to get in contact with you NI sales representative - or whoever sold you a cRIO.

I assume that you used PXI-systems either with a MXI-card or with a Windows controller board up to now since you do not own the LabVIEW real-time module. In that case a cDAQ chassis is really what you were looking for.

Regards, Jens

[JensG69]

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@CharlesD3 wrote:

If DAQmx is the advanced feature, then what is the basic feature?

I'm running the professional edition of LV 2019; 32-bit and 64-bit.

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Well, in the context of a compactRIO that is (or at least has been until recently has been) an advanced feature.

compactRIOs are on the market for more than 20 years now and it has always been a combination of a "small" (small compared to a PC) real-time computer/controller paired with a FPGA backplane. In the early day you had to programm your data aquistion yourself on the FPGA. That gave and gives you tremendous possibilites that you cannot achieve with usual NI-drivers. Then came the "scan engine", a precompiled FPGA-bitfile, but it limits you to a refresh rate of about 1 kHz.

Finally a few years ago NI started to implement DAQmx-compatibilies into their new line of cRIOs (first of cause in the expensive ones), so nowadays you can use such a cRIO just with the real-time module and without the FPGA-module and still create powerful data aquisition tasks.

Regards, Jens

[CharlesD3]

Yes, we had an optical link though a card in the PC that controlled everything.  That was a former employer, and that system uses LV Professional 2008 and is still running strong.  I will check with my current sales rep on the exchange idea whenever they get back to me regarding the Real-time module.

Right now, we are looking at just a USB Multifunction I/O module.  The one that meets our current needs is ~ $2k.  Speaking of which, if anyone knows of any hidden requirements or unwanted 'features' waiting for me should I buy one of those, please feel free to speak up now 😉

[CharlesD3]

Funny enough, the FlexRIO API V1 contains the only item I've found that the 'RIO Device' will connect to.  It outputs an FPGA reference, but generates an error and does not work. 

[rolfk]

FlexRIO is a line of FPGA enabled hardware for PXI chassis. It has evsn higher clock speeds than the cRIO and the FPGA digital IO support higher slew rates. It’s NOT what you would want judging from your comments and stated requirements, most notably it’s in an even higher price range! But if you want to design 6G test equipment its price is very competitive! 😀

FlexRIO uses the NI-RIO driver software to interface to the hardware and that is also used to interface to cRIOs. That is likely while it seems to accept the cRIO resource identifier. You need to have NI-RIO installed for anything of this to work but without RT module it won’t be very useful. NI-RIO is the interface to RIO type hardware, you still need to program the hardware somehow with at least an RT program and possibly an FPGA program depending on the timing requirements.

You clearly expected a cDAQ chassis. These are in terms of hardware not very different to CRIOs, in fact many contain the same hardware components but a cDAQ chassis has a preprogrammed firmware that provides data acquisition functionality through the DAQmx API on your host machine. If all you want to do is reading some analog and digital values and control an occasional digital signal these are perfect. But if your requirements change and you want to do control loops and other similar things you soon will run into problems with this. The intelligence must run on your host, the data IO is on a remote device connected through reliable but not real-time Ethernet. Control loop speeds higher than a few Hertz will usually not work that way.

Why you ended up with cRIO and not cDAQ is not quite clear. Even a knowledgable sales person can only advice what to buy on the data they receive. If the specification is terse, fuzzy or incorrect the according advice can’t be better. And in the current situations you might in fact have dealt with a distributor rather than NI itself. They have very few really knowledgeable sales people on staff. All they know is usually what is stated in the sparse documentation already and that they earn commission based on the sales volume.

[santo_13]

Have been following this thread for a few days now and my opinion to the thread starter,

Your agony with the pricing is understandable but it is the business model, it is just simple as that.

Why do all the iPhone users don't complain that apple sells a simple charger at a high price and don't bundle with the phone? And why everyone have to buy a lot of dongles for each of their Macbook series, I can keep adding such business strategies. You might answer that if you don't like such stuff about Apple don't buy apple, and might argue that you like the features and performance of apple devices but don't like such nuances.

So, my take is, you don't just get the best of both worlds, you make a compromise somewhere and you should do your homework while choosing such stuff.

I can't just go buy a new iPhone and come home to realize that it doesn't come with a charger, then go back to store to buy that, then realized I can't connect my wired headset and again headback to buy another cable.

Nothing against you, just trying to justify from a commoner point of view.

[wiebe@CARYA]

In this case, I think the situation is a bit different.

I've been in this situation quite a few times.

Customer asks for a DAQ solution.

cRIO RT is sold.

Software needs to be made.

Customer contacts integrator.

Software turns out to be expensive

Customer asks why.

Because the RT has to be programmed.

Integrator asks why the RT? Because it was better... 

A RT system is better when it's called for. It's simply more expensive when you don't need it.

It feels to me the wrong product was sold.

[CharlesD3]

I'm not sure where this "NI Store" full of knowledgeable sales people is, but lately all I get is acknowledgement emails from a 'noreply' address.  But, lest I digress into more complaining about NI's shortcomings, can anyone here tell me the difference between the [less expensive] "Debug/Deploy" version of Real-Time, and the "Development" version?