Combining an embedded real-time processor, a reconfigurable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and onboard analog and digital I/O on a single printed circuit board (PCB), NI Single-Board RIO devices for applications that need flexibility, high performance and reliability in a small form factor.

“NI Single-Board RIO helps lower development time and costs by giving engineers and scientists all the components required for a reliable, high-performance embedded system on a single printed circuit board,” said John Hanks, vice president of product marketing for data acquisition and industrial control at National Instruments. “By combining NI Single-Board RIO with the wide breadth of new I/O offerings, engineers and scientists easily can expand their custom embedded systems into applications such as power quality monitoring, structure health monitoring and embedded networking.”

With the new embedded C Series modules, engineers and scientists easily can add measurement quality I/O to their applications by plugging any combination of the new modules directly into the three I/O expansion ports on NI Single-Board RIO devices. The 15 modules include a three-channel, 300 V analog input, 16-channel analog output module; four-channel, 24-bit bridge/strain module; and four-channel, 24-bit universal module.

NI Single-Board RIO is one of several NI FPGA-based deployment platforms that have the NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture, which is composed of a real-time processor, FPGA and I/O modules. Because NI Single-Board RIO shares this architecture with the NI CompactRIO embedded control and data acquisition system, many engineers and scientists design and prototype their applications on CompactRIO and then deploy their systems to the lower-cost CompactRIO integrated system or NI Single-Board RIO devices. All the NI RIO technology platforms can be programmed easily using the NI LabVIEW graphical system design platform, so no recoding is required when transitioning from prototype to deployment. By using hardware with the same RIO architecture and a single software platform throughout the design, prototype and deployment phases, engineers and scientists can accelerate their development processes and increase system reliability.

National Instruments is a US-based supplier of measurement and automation products.