Remote monitoring for cRIO/sbRIO

[shansen1]

Hello all,

My company has very little experience with RIO products, but we are finally thinking about using either CompactRIO or sbRIO for a real application. This application will be mobile (i.e. on a moving vehicle), and we will require the ability to connect to the controllers remotely for diagnostics, monitoring, and upgrades. The particular area these controllers will be installed in will have good cell coverage, so I think we are looking at some kind of cell tower modem that will give us VPN access to the controllers.

During one of the keynotes at NI Week 2015, they showed off a company who used CompactRIO on city buses in the UK, and mentioned that the controllers were remotely monitored. I would love to know what kind of setup they were using, because those are very similar conditions to those that we will face.

Does anyone have experience remotely supporting RIO products? Any gotchas? Any hardware recommendations? Can the IDE and other NI tools cope with a low bandwidth connection through a cell tower?

[HeisenBerger15]

Hi shansen1,

I understand why you reached out to the community, but this would also be a perfect opportunity to reach out to a sales rep. They can spec out a system for you and explain how a system like this would work. You can reach them by dialing (877) 387-0015 or going to http://us.ni.com/contacts.

If you could set up a VPN in the vehicle, then you could connect to the RIOs on a "local" network that you VPN into. But I think it might be better to set them up using TCP/IP for simplicity and reliability. 

-CB

[shansen1]

Thanks Casey, we will be (and currently are) talking at length with our sales reps. Right now we are in the feasilbity stage, and are hoping to get feedback from people who have actually used a system like this in the field and figured out what works and what doesn't. Is this something that many people do? If not, is it because this is very difficult? What are the "gotchas"?

We are going to have to use some kind of VPN for security reasons, but the traffic will obviously still be using TCP/IP as the underlying protocol layer.