Hello rdtech,
You can use the NI 9146 Ethernet RIO Expansion Chassis with only LabVIEW on a host PC, and you do not need LabVIEW Real-Time or the FPGA module you will however need the NI RIO driver. Also, the Ethernet RIO would be seen as a network device, as you expected.
You will be using the expansion chassis in the Scan Interface mode, which is a special FPGA configuration that is shipped with the driver that will scan through all of the available channels on the chassis. This does not require the FPGA module as it is already compiled and included with the driver.
One thing that I would like to note is that the coding will be different than using a cDAQ and the DAQmx drivers, you will instead be reading from the individual channels directly instead of setting up tasks like DAQmx. If you would like to you can create a new project and begin the host PC code for this system by adding in the 9146 and modules to the project without physically having them on the network
If you are comfortable with not using the DAQmx driver, I think that the NI 9146 would work well for distributed data acquisition and take advantage of the higher operating temperatures.
Cheers,
Joel
