New board name - RIO Hardware

[Laura F.]

In order to more accurately reflect the discussions in the Real Time Measurement and Control board, we have updated the name to RIO Hardware.

Regards,

Laura
Web Support & Operations
National Instruments

[dwisti]

Where should we post real-time software related questions?

[Laura F.]

Hi dwisti,

If your question is about LabVIEW FPGA or Real-Time, please post them to the LabVIEW board.  If it is about LabWindows/CVI Real-Time Module, please post to the LabWindows/CVI board.  If it doesn't fit into those categories or has to do with driver software, please continue to post to this board.

Thanks,

Laura

[dwisti]

Why not have a real-time forum which is separate from Labview?

Putting RT or FPGA questions into the same forum as general Labview questions means less answers/replies from me.  I'm not going to subscribe the general topic of Labview when all I'm interested in is real-time control. 

[Christian_L]

I would also prefer to keep a more general name for the board which encourages the general RT community to post questions here. Most of the questions tend to be software related (software that runs on RT targets), and I don't know that "RIO Hardware" properly reflects that audience. Most questions were not RIO related. Many were CompactRIO or sbRIO related, but tend to deal with the RT portion of these platforms, not the RIO (FPGA) portion.

I would be interested why the old name was thought to not be accurate.

[GerardoG]

As dwisti said, I think a board that is centered around LabVIEW Real-Time programming and a board centered around LabVIEW FPGA programming would be best.

These boards would facilitate discussion about items that are specific to these environments with a group of experts that understand the ramifications of RT and FPGA. While the regular LabVIEW board can help as well, RT and FPGA experts would have to scan through the list of posts to pick out the relevant ones. 

Christian - I think the old title didn't encompass some FPGA applications like signal processing. Also, it didn't signal to users that LabVIEW Real-Time and LabVIEW FPGA experts subscribed to the forum.

Gerardo

[Christian_L]

What I liked about the old name is that it addressed a specific application space, rather than a set of products. (We could easily adapt the name to cover processing/FPGA as well. Often times questions will span multiple product lines, but pertain to a certain type of application so it would be nice if users could have a place to address these types of questions. Thinking and talking in terms of applications will better identify trends and needs within the NI user community.

[Laura F.]

The name was changed because of multiple instances of feedback, both within NI and by customers that they did not know where to post their RIO questions. 

We prefer to keep LabVIEW Module questions on the LabVIEW board because it's possible that someone using one of those modules has a question that is capable of being answered by the general LabVIEW community.  In addition, there are many experts worldwide that participate on the LabVIEW board and do not want to fragment that community.  The only LabVIEW Modules with their own boards were considered to be very special cases with a different audience.

One option brought up for the board name was to leave the "Real Time Measurement and Control" title and just add the descriptive text listing the hardware.  After talking to people about the options, the consensus leaned towards RIO Hardware as the title.  If enough people feel that this board better serves an application rather than specific hardware family we can go with that name instead.

Thanks,

Laura

[Laura F.]

Thanks all for the feedback -

After more discussions, I am going to change the name back to Real-Time Measurement and Control but leave the description of product families underneath so that users with RIO questions know where to go.  We definitely want to keep the discussions on this board flexible so that Real Time applications can be discussed here.  There is a strong community of users that monitor this board and can participate in these discussions which are incredibly valuable to the entire community.

Thanks for your patience as I get this sorted out!

Regards,

Laura
Web Support & Operations
National Instruments

[dwisti]

Laura,

Currently, Real-Time is a sub-forum of the Additional NI Product Boards.  This is way down on the page.  So, most people are misled to post real-time question in the general Labview forum.  To add to this misleading, there is a quick search link for RT right underneath the general Labview forum.

How come Real-Time is not a sub-forum of "Most Active Software Boards"?

David