Chapter 1
Introduction
©
National Instruments Corporation
1-5
I/O Daughterboard
The PCI-7041 daughterboard provides the I/O functionality. The
daughterboard is a National Instruments PXI device with some mechanical
modifications to allow it to connect to the processor board. You can expect
the same high performance and features from the daughterboard that you
do from the standard version of the device. Refer to the
LabVIEW Help
,
available by selecting
Help»Contents and Index
in LabVIEW, and
Chapter 2,
PCI-7041 Installation and Configuration
, for more information
about hardware and software configuration.
Accessory Board
The accessory board brings some I/O signals out from the PCI-7041.
These include the following:
•
RS-232 serial port
•
SMB Watchdog timer
•
LEDs
Use of the accessory board is optional. If you do not need any of the above
I/O, you may leave the accessory board disconnected.
Refer to the following sections for information about the serial port,
watchdog timer, and LEDs.
Communication to the Host
The PCI-7041 communicates with the host computer by way of shared
memory. The shared memory is accessible from both the host PCI bus and
the PCI-7041 embedded PCI bus. LabVIEW manages this shared memory
and provides various methods for using it. For example, the PCI-7041 can
be accessed as if it were a device on your network. LabVIEW exports the
PCI-7041 to the network on which the host computer resides. This means
that LabVIEW functions such as VI server and TCP/IP will work with the
PCI-7041. The PCI-7041 can even act as a Web server to send data across
the Internet. You also can access the shared memory directly using the
shared memory VIs in LabVIEW. Refer to the
LabVIEW RT User Manual
for more information about communicating with the PCI-7041.
