What to do with an old MyRIO

[zageek]

Hi all

A colleague who left a while back left and old MyRIO behind that I found the other day. Its probably been sitting for 4-5 years. I do know he told me the trial LabView RT license expired  when he had it. I think he won it at an NI event so didnt pay for the original kit.

What can I do with this now? Can I revive it without buying a new license or will be possible in the future to explore using it with Community or something otherwise should I discard it? It would be a pity if I had to discard it as its a powerful piece of hardware.

[Bob_Schor]

The myRIO is, indeed, a nice machine that NI seems to have "forgotten" (as they have, more-or-less, also "forgotten" the Academic market).  The latest version of the myRIO Software Toolkit, required (pretty much) in order to actually use the myRIO, was issued in 2019.  I asked, and was told, that NI has not "abandoned" the myRIO, and that a new Toolkit would be released in the 2021 "release cycle", but it hasn't happened yet.

I have my own myRIO, which I've been using for various things.  Did you know you can use it to drive SPI (or I²C) chips?  We actually have an application that has 16 daughter-boards with SPI A/D converters on them, and through some clever Chip design on the MotherBoard (way over my head), we've actually gotten the myRIO to do simultaneous 10 kHz Acquisition from all 16 SPI Chips (we "cheat" -- we use a common MOSI, SS, and CLK signal, then use 16 DIO ports for the 16 MISO lines coming from the 16 daughter-board chips).

Don't throw out that myRIO!  Send it to me, if you want it to have a Happy Home where it will be appreciated (it might be fun to develop a project with two myRIOs, perhaps exchanging data with each other using WiFi).

Bob Schor