Whether USRP can be controlled by CompactRIO?

[HustLiliAn]

HI, everyone, We want to  control the USRP by NI CompactRIO, not an computer, whether it is possible? 

[FarrisA]

The NI USRP driver supports Windows operating systems ( 7, vista,xp), and for that reason you can't control the USRP by NI CompactRIO.

May I ask for the motivation to control the USRP by CompactRIO? Maybe I can reommend a different solution.

[HustLiliAn]

We want to do some real-time and high throughput communication with USRP, however , the PC is slow at modulation and demodulation process, if this work can be done in the FPGA, maybe faster! So CompactRIO may be a good choice.

Thanks !!

[FarrisA]

The high throughput aspect usually depends on the communication -to-the host bus speed,  the instantaneous bandwidth of the RF front end or the ADCs of the device.

Can you please specify what is the throughput you are trying to achieve? and what is stopping you from doing so on the USRP?

Another key question to answer is how much delay your communication system can handle? This will determine whether you really need the FPGA processing capabilities or not.

As mentioned in earlier, I'm trying to figure out a solution that utilizes what you currently have, and I'm guessing you already have a CompactRIO, correct?

However, you might  want to consider the NI FLexRIO Software-Defined Radio.solution because it sounds so far that it will meet all what you are looking for.

[HustLiliAn]

We have implemented a video transmission demo with USRPs . There are some problems

First, about the high throughput, we found the modulation or demodulation speed is the bottleneck to make the video to be more fluent, now just 2 frame per seconds. The parameters are: image frame size  40Kbits, IQ rate 1M. For example, a packet of 4096 bits ,  the demodulation cost about 30ms.  We define the throughput as the actual data we can process per second, the image we can recover per seconds.

Second, we have the  NI FLexRIO Software-Defined Radio platform as you mentioned , we have 5663E,5673E and FlexRIO, however, we found the LabVIEW FPGA RF Communications Library 3.0 is not abundant and easy to use as the modulation toolkit , we have meet many difficulties.

Third, even we have solve the FPGA problem on the PXI ,  however , the transmitter of USRP still controlled by PC, and the modulation is slow, so we do not want the PC to do much thing, CompactRIO with FPGA is a good choice.

Thanks for  your attention.

[FarrisA]

Based on what you described, you need the FPGA to be doing the processing.

As mentioned earlier, the USRP driver does not support the CompactRIO, and therefore this solution is not possible. A PXI solution seems the most feasible.

You can implement all the signal processing on the FLexRIO without having to use the PC. If you want to use the 5663E and 5673E as the RF RX and TX , you can use P2P streaming from both the 5663E and 5673E to the FlexRIO through the backplane of the PXI chassis.

Another more simple option is to use use the 5791 FlexRIO adapter module as the RF RX and TX,