The myRIO is an example of "Real-Time" hardware that you address with the Real-Time Toolkit that is available for LabVIEW. Real-Time hardware runs (naturally!) a Real-Time operating system and when you open a Real-Time Project in LabVIEW, you'll see that you can write code that runs on two separate processors -- a PC (running what I'll call "ordinary" LabVIEW, with access to a keyboard, a mouse, lots of memory, lots of disk storage, and a "screen" so you can "see what you are doing". The Real-Time Hardware with its Real-Time OS doesn't have the keyboard, mouse, copious memory, and lots of disk storage, but it does have an operating system "tuned" to be very responsive to (usually already-attached) hardware.
During development, you interact with code running on the RT Target through the Real-Time Project. Have you noticed that the Front Panel Controls and Indicators on the Host PC you can interact with during development and running of the program, while on the RT Target, they are only "inputs" and "outputs", a way of passing parameters around between sub-VIs.
You interact with the Target generally through TCP/IP. When you are developing the RT code, LabVIEW takes care of making it appear that you are directly interacting with the code running on the RT Target. But have you noticed that when you tell LabVIEW to run a routine on the myRIO, the first thing it does is "compile" it (on the PC) and download a run-time version of the code to the myRIO, where it starts it running.
If you are going to collect data on the myRIO, you will (probably) want to store the data as it is acquired on the PC. There are several ways to do this, all of which utilize the TCP/IP connection between the Host and Target (in almost all cases, it's traveling over the USB cable that connects the myRIO to your PC).
Bob Schor
