NI offers chassis for hardware-in-the-loop testing

Built on NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology, these chassis deliver the benefits of field-programmable gate-array (FPGA)-based hardware and C Series I/O to applications requiring hundreds or thousands of channels.

Each expansion chassis contains a Xilinx FPGA that is programmable with the NI Labview FPGA Module, giving engineers the flexibility of high-speed and customisable I/O timing, inline processing and control.

The MXI-Express RIO 14-slot expansion chassis with onboard Virtex-5 FPGAs offer a high-end solution for large applications that require high channel counts, mixed I/O for a variety of measurements and custom signal-processing and control algorithms.

The MXI-Express link delivers high bandwidth for streaming data to and from multiple chassis from a single controller, offering hundreds of C Series module slots and thousands of channels of analogue, digital and communication I/O, including strain, acceleration, channel-to-channel isolated voltage input and simultaneous voltage.

'Using the MXI-Express RIO chassis, we can build highly customisable, high-channel-count conditioned measurement systems,' said Albion Knight, vice president of Green Mountain Research.

'We now use Labview FPGA to program the FPGA within the chassis and add custom signal processing, control and timing to solve a variety of high-channel-count control and acquisition applications,' he added.

The NI 9148 8-slot Ethernet expansion chassis adds flexible distributed I/O to RIO systems.

With standard CAT 5 Ethernet cabling, it communicates with NI CompactRIO, real-time PXI controllers, the NI industrial controller or any networked Windows PC.

The flexibility of the NI 9148 chassis makes it suitable for seamlessly adding expansion I/O to an existing network.

With an onboard FPGA and Labview FPGA software, engineers can implement custom signal analysis, control and safety interlocks local to each chassis to create a modular system.

Engineers can also use more than 50 third-party C Series I/O modules with the chassis, including wireless modules based on 802.11, GPS, Edge and other technologies.

When combining the NI 9148 Ethernet chassis with wireless modules from SEA Datentechnik, engineers can turn the NI 9148 chassis into wireless expansion systems for applications with difficult cabling.

These expansion chassis are an extension of the NI RIO platform, which delivers a variety of solutions at different prices and performance levels for control, design and test applications.

The common NI RIO architecture consists of a processor, customisable FPGA and modular I/O, which combine to create a flexible system that solves complex application problems.

Engineers can use the Labview graphical development environment to program the processor, FPGA and I/O of their RIO system to create high-performance embedded systems.