Hello.
I'm asking this as there is a myriad of devices but none seem to fit what I want. I will describe here:
We have several devices around the building that need monitoring, and inside an industrial back room all the wires come out. Some are digital voltages, some are analog voltages. The voltage range is +/- 5V logic for the digital ones and 0-12V for the analog ones. But it should be able to handle +24V just in case.
The back room had before an old NI box with a bunch of wires in a super messy dusty cluster hooked up to an old win XP PC that ran a logging program that was made with LabView 8.5.1. No fancy stuff, just basic labview with stock DAQmx drivers and an SCB-68 box attached to a PCI card inside the PC.
Of course, after some years, the win XP PC died a horrible death. Finally actually. Its been set up in 2007 but had loads of issues. The disk crashed some time. The windows got corrupted once and was reinstalled. The windows complained it was not genuine since its not online for years. Random reboots and blue screens up to once a week in the end. So it took effort to fix and maintain this silly piece of PC that only host a DAQ device and a log program on it. Small things, but far from an fire and forget solution that we wanted. Now I think the mainboard got fried cuz it wont load into bios even.
Now I could get a new PC and build it with motherboard that has old PCI slots and find drivers that works in windows 10 (I hope!). I can fix the logging program in labview so it works with LV2017 also. Now its a bit of work, and my boss is not happy about it, he wants a stable plug and play thingy that just works, and I don't need to use time to set up and maintain over the years, reboot that stupid PC, or start it up if it dies, reinstall windows or whatever. But in time, its just gonna be the same because its still a PC with windows inside a dirty room.
Ok, now to what I want:
Is there an NI device that I can log voltages, plug this thingymabob into the ethernet plug, give it an IP address, and just run the log program on a more useful PC where people actually are?
It would save time. And costs.
I looked into CompactRIO and those thingies, but they seem so overkill. Very expensive are they as well, and I am unsure if I can use it with the LabView license I got since it say it require Labview realtime and monitor and control modules. I dont need so much fancyness. Just simple DAQ device with ethernet plug so it can communicate a long distance. Dont wanna use USB with loads of repeaters...
Do NI got that, or should I look elsewhere? It still need to be possible to talk to it with Labview.
Thanks for your time.
