National Instruments myRIO-1950 Embedded I/O Device for Students

Developed by National Instruments, the myRIO-1950 (Part Numbers: 782691-01, 783758-01, 783543-01, 782690-01) is an embedded reconfigurable I/O (RIO) device intended for industrial and educational use in robotics, control, and mechatronics systems. It provides a flexible framework for using a single device to teach and apply different design concepts. The myRIO-1950 is a feature-rich device with eight analog inputs, four analog outputs, and 32 digital I/O lines split between two MXP connectors. With a precision of 12 bits, these analog inputs and outputs can process signals between 0 and 5 volts. A three-axis accelerometer is also included in the gadget for motion sensing purposes.

A dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor clocked at 667 MHz and a Xilinx Z-7010 FPGA provide the myRIO-1950 with its processing capability. It provides 256 MB of DDR3 memory running at a frequency of 533 MHz and 512 MB of nonvolatile memory. One of the connectivity options is a USB host connector that can accommodate USB flash drives, USB-to-IDE converters, web cameras, and machine vision cameras. Programming and data sharing are made possible through communication with a host computer via the USB device connector.

The MXP connections enable expansion capabilities by giving access to digital I/O lines, UART communication lines, analog input and output channels, and supplementary digital functionalities like SPI, I2C, PWM, and quadrature encoder input. The digital I/O lines of the myRIO-1950 have logic levels compatible with 5V LVTTL input and 3.3V LVTTL output, and each line can be separately programmed as an input or an output. Pull-up resistors are a part of every DIO line that guarantee consistent signal integrity.

A maximum aggregate update rate of 345 kS/s is supported by analog output channels, which additionally have ±16V overload protection. Analog input channels provide an aggregate sample rate of 500 kS/s with overvoltage protection. Students and educators may work on real engineering projects on the myRIO-1950 because of its small size, strong computing power, and easy interface with LabVIEW or C programming environments. Because of its open board design, installing and integrating it into embedded systems requiring intensive processing tasks is made simple. The learning experience is further enhanced by a library of tutorials and course materials, which makes the myRIO-1950 an excellent instrument for practical experimentation and hands-on instruction in engineering fields.