I/O and Communication Question for sbRIO-9601

[DL84]

Hello,

Our company is looking at using the sbRIO-9601 in an OEM application and I had two technical questions about the board.

1) Are the VISA functions supported?  I saw it has an RS232 port, I just want to make sure I can read/write easily off of it using prebuilt VI's instead of doing it all low level and from scratch.

2) We will be reading and writing simple commands to a device paired via the RS232, and based on the response, illuminating an LED driven by the board.  I haven't selected any LED's and was hoping NI could provide a little more clarification on the power limits provided in the sbRIO-9601 User guide.  We'll be using the 3.3V output...will I need to put any current limiting resistor in line or can I put the diode directly between the output pin and the digital ground?  We'll be driving at most 15 LEDs, however we'll never see more than 3 on at any given time.  I saw in the 3.3V I/O section of that doccumentation that the max tested current per channel is 3mA...but total bus is 330mA.  Is there a limit to how much we can supply off each channel so long as we stay under the 330mA all together?

Thanks

[jareds · Accepted solution]

Hi leachdor,

1) VISA functions are supported for the RS232 port on the sbRIO, so you don't have to do any low level programming for them.

2) The per channel maximum that we specify is 3 mA.  You can combine multiple channels in parallel to increase this output up to 330 mA for the total bus.  Since you are only going to be driving 15 LEDs and there are 110 output channels, you should be able to combine a few per LED.

[DL84]

Thanks for the response!