VXI Remote Controllers

National Instruments offers a variety of interfaces to control your VXI system from a remote PXI system, PC, or workstation. MXI-2 and MXI-3-based controllers offer the highest overall performance. USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and GPIB interfaces provide lower-cost solutions for remotely controlling a VXI system. MXI-2 interface kits offer block-transfer performance comparable to embedded controllers with the additional flexibility and expandability of a desktop PC or workstation. With MXI-3 interface kits, the controlling computer can be up to 200 m away. The VXI-USB includes a word-serial accelerator and optimization for block moves making a good low-cost solution for message-based control of VXI. A GPIB-VXI connection, which offers a low-cost solution, is particularly well-suited for applications that are not data-transfer intensive and use primarily message-based instruments. The IEEE 1394 interface kit boasts block performance faster than the GPIB-VXI/C.