Feedback from Eaton Corporation Lead Engineer for Power Systems & Architectures,Yakov Familiant

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Eaton Corporation summary (www.eaton.com😞

• More than 100 years of experience in electrical, hydraulic and mechanical power
• 2011 sales of $16.0 billion
• 73,000 employees

Below is commentary from Eaton Corporation Lead Engineer for Power Systems & Architectures,Yakov Familiant, based on his experiences with the new NI Single-Board RIO GPIC (datasheet) and LabVIEW FPGA/Multisim graphical system design methodology for rapid commercialization of power electronics (paper).

Eaton Corporation participated in the NI General Purpose Inverter Controller (GPIC) Beta Program and generously agreed to share Yakov's feedback publically:

“With the NI tools, I can shorten development time significantly on a lot of projects by having a single system design tool chain that takes me all the way to commercial deployment. The NI General Purpose Inverter Controller enables me to prototype and deploy quickly using a RIO architecture that's suitable and cost effective for high volume production.

What's my personal experience with the tools? I was able to get a power distribution controller up and running in a month with NI RIO. I used a single NI LabVIEW graphical toolchain and got up to speed quickly. Now I see that I can both prototype and deploy using the same RIO architecture. We can now have commercial hardware out for field testing in 3 months by doing our prototype validation on deployable hardware which is pre-validated and cost effective for production.

Prior to the availability of this graphical system design technology, we developed a custom DSP board for our prototypes. In the past it took us several times longer for a full custom design for a DSP-based circuit board prototype, which then had to be redesigned for volume commercialization after the field trials. With other competitive Real-Time platforms, it required a larger team of circuit designers, DSP programmers, engineers and technicians and we still could not deploy it. Also, we could not have loop frequencies above about 40 kHz, even with a highly skilled DSP programmer, because the DSP is a sequential processing device. You have to be very careful not to add more code than the DSP can handle or you can literally have an inverter prototype go up in smoke.

With FPGA, everything is truly running in parallel so I don't have timing problems. I'm able to program the FPGA using LabVIEW and run loops in nanoseconds on the NI General Purpose Inverter Controller.

Now I can develop the concept myself using LabVIEW FPGA and simulate the circuit using Multisim co-simulation. I can myself do the implementation and final deployment.

Instead of being locked to a desktop controller, I have it all running on an embedded system that can be deployed. The deployment is easy. With this approach, I can do it all myself. I can even check the RIO control software against a real-time simulation of the power electronics circuitry which runs on a separate, high-end RIO FPGA target.

Another advantage is that the I/O interface circuitry on the NI GPIC reduces my development cost and complexity a lot. Before we had 12-bit unipolar analog inputs on our DSP boards, which required a lot of op-amp circuitry to shift the signals up, and then adjust the scaling and gains. Also, there were different sourcing & sinking digital outputs and relays that we couldn't control directly. The GPIC inverter controller I/O is carefully optimized for power electronics applications and really allows me to minimize the effort required for I/O interfaces.

The last but not least important feature of the NI GPIC and LabVIEW is set of communication algorithms that allow integrating the controller in any state-of-the-art information network.”

– Yakov Familiant, Eaton Corporation, Lead Engineer, Power Systems & Architectures

Did you participate in the NI sbRIO GPIC beta program? Have you evaluated the new system level design tools? How does it compare to the way you did your development in the past? Please reply to this thread and share your comments and feedback.