National Instruments

CompactRIO is the product most plant engineers associate with National Instruments, now branded NI: a controller that pairs a real-time processor with a user-programmable FPGA and takes plug-in C Series I/O modules. The company was founded in 1976 in Austin, USA, and works in test and measurement systems. Seven Star LLC sources and supplies NI CompactRIO controllers and related hardware for monitoring and control projects in Oman and the GCC.

NI CompactRIO controllers listed

Two controllers are on this page, the cRIO-9035 and the cRIO-9053. Both run the NI Linux Real-Time operating system. NI describes the cRIO-9053 as a four-slot controller with a 1.33 GHz dual-core Intel Atom processor and an Artix-7 50T FPGA, with I/O reached through NI-DAQmx drivers or the LabVIEW FPGA Module. The cRIO-9035 is a different model with its own slot count and FPGA, so the two are not interchangeable without a check of the application.

Ordering NI hardware: what we need

Send the model name (for example cRIO-9053) and the NI part number from the label, which looks like 78xxxx-01. List the C Series modules that will sit in the chassis, and say which software versions the project uses, because driver support depends on the controller generation. For a replacement, a photo of the label avoids confusion between similar model numbers.