CompactRIO Gets Hot Under the Collar

CSIR Landwards Sciences, an NI customer in South Africa, recently learned just how much abuse the NI cRIO-9004 real-time controller is capable of taking. The company was testing the vulnerability of landmine protected vehicles and using LabVIEW and CompactRIO for capturing data during preset explosions. They considered using PXI and FieldPoint for this application but decided on CompactRIO after seeing a demo.

Between 12 and 16 strain gauges are connected at various critical points (sometimes on crash test dummies) on the vehicle, as well as inside. The data is sampled at 10 Ksps per channel and stored in the flash memory for a number of tests. The data is later retrieved and processed offline. Something went wrong during testing and this is what was left of the controller after being exposed to temperatures in excess of 200 degrees Celsius. Amazingly, they were able to retrieve all data stored on the device.