Add additional serial ports when using 9683?

[nathand]

Is there any way I can configure additional serial port peripherals, using extra DIO pins on a sbRIO-9607 that is also connected to a 9683? The manual says

"Right-click your FPGA Target and select New»RIO Mezzanine Card... to choose a generic Digital RMC and access all 96 DIO lines with digital I/O nodes.

Note

This methodology does not allow you to configure the DIO lines as processor peripherals such as CAN, SDIO, or Serial."

Which suggests that there isn't a way to configure the 9683 RMC and also allocate some of the spare digital lines for use as a serial port - but I'm hoping I'm wrong and it can be done. If not, is there any way to get a customized RMC configuration with two more serial ports, or to set up a CLIP that matches the 9683 ports and includes additional serial ports?

[BMac]

You bet. It's very common to use some of the 32 LVTTL lines on the NI 9683 GPIC I/O board to create copper serial ports or fiber-optic communication links. For copper serial ports, a differential line driver is populated on your interface board.

A good example of this is the AgileSwitch interface board for GPIC. The code linked below includes includes serial UART IP cores for LabVIEW FPGA, which you could modify for your application requirements. Due to long file paths from Xilinx Coregen you must, unzip the code in to a directory path (i.e. C:\LabVIEW 2014) and NOT a long path such as your desktop.

ftp://ftp.ni.com/evaluation/powerdev/training/GPICReferenceDesign2014AgileStack.zip

[nathand]

Thanks, but is there any way to do this using the built-in peripheral interface, like you can do when configuring a CLIP file? That is, can I make this serial port appear as a VISA resource so I could, for example, using the Modbus library without any modifications? (Yes, I know that with the current Modbus library, I only need to override one class, but it would be nice if I didn't need to do that at all.)