CompactRIO Real-Time Deployment Requirements

Question

Hello, I have a few questions regarding the requirement of NI's Real-Time Deployment Option and a cRIO.  I have multiple licenses of LabVIEW 2009, some with the Real-Time option and some without.  That being said, I am wondering what functionality will be missing from the machines that do not have the Real-Time option installed on them.  I borrowed a cRIO from someone and was able to read a voltage from the cRIO without having the Real-Time Deployment, so I am not sure what I am missing regarding functionality and not having Real-Time Deployment installed.  Any information on the subject would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.
Michael 

Answer 1

MSATLAB,
I see three pieces of software potentially involved:
1) LabVIEW
2) LabVIEW Real-Time Module
3) LabVIEW FPGA Module
With just LabVIEW, you can deploy a prebuilt bitfile to the FPGA and communicate with that bitfile.  You only need the NI-RIO driver.  (In order to built bitfiles, you need the FPGA module.)  However, without the Real-Time module you won't be able to communicate with the controller portion at all.
With LabVIEW and the Real-Time module, you can interact with the controller and multiple hardware cards.  If you don't have the FPGA module (to build a bitfile), you can use the Scan Mode interface to the FPGA.  With the Real-Time module, you can also deploy network shared variables to the controller itself.  (Once they're deployed, they stay deployed until you specifically undeploy them or format the controller.)
An ideal setup perhaps for you would be to do the following:
On a computer with LabVIEW, the Real-Time module, and the FPGA module, create a startup executable (for the controller), create a bitfile (for the FPGA), and deploy network shared variables (to the controller) that can be read from LabVIEW on any other computer.  Without knowing more about how your cRIO was configured beforehand, it's hard to tell how you got a valid voltage reading.  It's possible that you used the process I outlined here.
Kevin S.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments