cDAQ Controller vs cRIO

[Worle]

So after 5 years of using National Instruments kit, today I found out that you can get cDAQ contollers as well as chassis. As far as I can tell the controllers are a cRIO without the FPGA. (I have only ever used cDAQ chassis or cRIO's in the past)

Can someone give me overview of why you would use a cDAQ controller over a cRIO.. I was expecting the cDAQ controllers to be cheaper (No FPGA) but that doesn't seem to be the case. For example if you compare a cRIO-9035, https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/crio-9035-specs/page/specs.html  and a cDAQ-9133, https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/cdaq-9133-specs/page/specs.html , they are are pretty comparable spec wise but the cDAQ is £50 more expensive.

Is programming a cDAQ controller the same as programming the RTOS of a cRIO?

[Terry_ALE]

The main reference for cRIO development is https://www.ni.com/en/shop/compactrio/compactrio-developers-guide.html

LabVIEW RT development vs LabVIEW for Desktop is different enough but hard to quantify as to how different it is.

[crossrulz]

To make it even more unclear, the cRIO-904X and cRIO-905X series can use DAQmx to program the FPGA.

5-6 years ago, I did look at a cRIO vs an embedded cDAQ for an application.  I was also surprised on the cost difference: cDAQ was a lot more expensive.  I of course went with the cRIO and put almost all of the logic in the FPGA (RT was really only to store configurations and communicate with the host PC).