National Instruments reckons its NI 8171 Series comprises the fastest highest-performance 3U embedded controllers on the market for PXI/CompactPCI. Featuring Pentium III and Celeron processors, the NI 8171 Series controllers incorporate an extensive set of standard and extended peripherals - such as hard drive, floppy drive, Ethernet and GPIB - into a single module for easier integration and less cabling among PXI modules. In addition, the controllers offer the instrumentation features of an external SMB connection and internal circuitry to route timing and synchronisation signals to or from the internal PXI trigger bus.
Engineers and scientists can use the NI 8171 Series controllers for a wide spectrum of applications - from high-performance automated systems to low-cost embedded systems.
The rugged, industrial packaging of the NI 8171 Series makes them ideal for use in harsh environments to perform a variety of functions including functional test, machine monitoring and control, and data acquisition.
The NI 8176 is the top of the range, and the highest-performance 3U embedded controller available with a 1.26GHz Pentium III processor with 512Kbyte of on-chip advanced transfer cache; the NI 8175 is a high-performance 3U embedded controller with a 866MHz Pentium III processor; and the NI 8174 is a low-cost 3U embedded controller with a 566MHz Celeron processor.
The controllers integrate seamlessly with easy-to-use application software, including NI's LabVIEW and Measurement Studio, and test management software, such as NI TestStand.