External PC to control PXI without using embedded controller

[Prateek_aero]

Hello,

I have two PXIe chassis and controllers (NI PXIE 8133 and 8106) that are pretty old. They use Win 7, 32 bits and have limited ram. Therefore, I want to use an external PC/Win 10 to control, acquire data from PXIe X series cards ( NI PXIe 6368 and 6358) installed in the PC, without using controller.

Can someone suggest the cheapest and hassle free option of acquiring data (using matlab installed on my PC) to acquire data from X series cards installed on the Chassis ?

Warm Regards

[santo_13]

You have to replace the controllers on the chassis with a remote control card.

This article describes how - https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z000000P97bSAC&l=en-US

Here are the list of available remote control modules - https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/hardware/products/pxi-remote-control-module.html

The simplest one is 8301 thunderbolt3 card, you would need thunderbolt 3 on your Win10 computer, even if that is the case, there have been multiple cases of the BIOS limiting the Thunderbolt3 features.

[Prateek_aero]

Thanks for your quick reply.

Unfortunately, not all PC have the thunderbolt slots (connected to motherboards).

Therefore, I was wondering if it does not make sense to still use the controller but connected to my PC. In principle if I can stream the data from the controller directly to my PC then I can still use the existing controller. What hardware components (on my PC) will I need to stream the data directly from the controller to my PC ? Also what are the drawbacks of this compared to using a remote control card. 

Regards

[santo_13 · Accepted solution]

If you don't want to use a remote control module, there are two ways to approach this,

1. Implement your own application to run on the PXI Controller, this application should directly control the PXI instruments and provides access to other computers over TCP/IP - you've to expose the functionalities, create command format etc.,
2. NI supports grpc for their devices - https://github.com/ni/grpc-device

This is because the PXI instruments are directly connected to the controller slot through PCI/PCIe bus and a low-level bus control is possible only by any system that directly connects to the PCI bus.

When using a remote control module, this PCI bus is exposed over MXI and on the computer side, you plug in a PCI/PCIe card and thereby connecting all PXI instruments to the controlling computer present outside the chassis.

This is still applicable to Thunderbolt3 which is an extension of PCIe bus and routes to the PCI bridge on the computer.

Basic rule - anything that can access the PCI bus on the PXI chassis can control the instruments.