LabVIEW FPGA

[captainfungus]

Hello Forum,

I got an old SB-RIO 9606 and the code was written on LabVIEW 2013 with FPGA 2013. I am trying to migrate it to 2019. However, LabVIEW 2019 won't detect my SB-RIO but 2013 will. I understand that FPGA 2019 won't support my hardware due to the 3 year compatibility window. How can I fix this? Am I stuck to 2013 on this project?

[RavensFan]

So are you saying you have LV 2019 installed, but NOT FPGA 2019?

You are certainly going to need FPGA 2019 to work with an sbRIO in LV 2019.

If you are saying you didn't install it because you have LV 2013 and don't want to lose FPGA 2013 on the same machine, then you are going to need to install LV2019 and FPGA on a different PC, or use virtual machines on your PC.

[captainfungus]

Ok that solves my confusion. I thought I can work with older versions of FPGAs on newer Labviews.

[RavensFan]

Actually, I think you might be able to install FPGA 2019 along with LV 2019 on the same PC as FPGA 2013 and LV 2013.  I know I have all modules for several LabVIEW versions installed side by side on the same PC

Modules are basically an extension of the development environment.  They need to be the same version since they work together so closely.

Now I'm not sure if you might run into problems at the driver level, so the installation of the RIO drivers in this case.  Drivers like DAQmx and probably RIO will only support the last several versions of LabVIEW.  So you can install DAQmx 19.0 and it will work with LV 19 and LV 18 and LV 17, for example.  But will not go all the way back to LV13.  But you do need the version of a driver that matches or LV version or higher to be able to work with the newer versions (in other words, DAQmx 18 will not work with LV 19).

For the RIO drivers, look at NI-RIO and LabVIEW Version Compatibility

In summary, I don't think you'll have any issues with installing the FPGA module for 2019 along with FPGA 2013 and their respective LabVIEW versions.  But your concerns about the large gap in versions probably really applies to the drivers, more specifically the NI-RIO drivers.

[captainfungus]

Thank you. I will give it a go and see how it goes.

[MrJackHamilton]

I've having a similar issue with support for legacy cRIO RT-FPGA chassis. I am have success with LabVIEW 2017 and cRIO 17.6 RT and FPGA to support these.

You cannot have any newer versions of LV Dev as they will update and overwrite the FPGA-RT toolkits and MAX drivers.

You will get very odd and frustrating errors attempting to connect to legacy systems in MAX if they are not supported. They *might* be detected under the remote devices tree - but you cannot change settings or deploy software.

Using a pure LV2017 development system - made all these issue go away.

Additionally, watch out for a odd problem with MAX and Windows10. We discovered after much frustration, that the 'RT Windows Services were 'OFF'. The state of the service is shown in MAX on the system info panel, about 1/2 down. Turn the service back ON - restart windows, open MAX verify it shown as now ON.

Good Luck