National Instruments has announced a suite of prototyping hardware that makes it possible for engineers and scientists to prototype industrial and embedded projects faster, reduce time to market and lower development costs.

CompactRIO Controller and Five FPGA-Based Chassis are ideal for prototyping renewable energy, medical and robotics applications

National Instruments' suite of prototyping hardware makes it possible for engineers and scientists to prototype industrial and embedded projects faster, reduce time to market and lower development costs.

The five NI CompactRIO reconfigurable chassis feature a Xilinx Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). 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 of hardware, along with NI 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.

The NI graphical system design tools allows engineers to 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. This approach makes it possible for small teams of engineers to quickly build a prototype to evaluate and prove the value of their next project.

The NI cRIO-911x reconfigurable chassis combined with the LabView FPGA Module helps engineers and scientists take advantage of FPGA technology with off-the-shelf hardware for rapid prototyping.

Additionally, LabViews FPGA technology features hundreds of pre-built graphical intellectual property blocks for signal processing, communication protocols, control and interfacing to analogue 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 quick connectivity to a variety of digital and analogue sensors and actuators during the prototyping process.

The cRIO-9022 controller is programmed with the LabView Real-Time Module, which 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.

More information: www.ni.com