NI Announces New IP67 Edge Nodes for the Industrial Internet of Things

The latest Industrial Controller adds IP67 reliability to high-performance processing and control applications.

AUSTIN, Texas – November 28, 2017 – NI (Nasdaq: NATI), the provider of platform-based systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, announced today the IC-3173 Industrial Controller, NI’s first IP67-rated controller. The new controller is ideally suited to act as an Industrial Internet of Things edge node in extremely harsh locations including spray down manufacturing environments, test cells and outdoor locations without the need for a protective enclosure. The IP67 rating helps ensure reliable operation in the presence of dust and water, in accordance to IEC standard 60529.

Industrial Controllers are high-performance, fanless devices that deliver high levels of processing power and connectivity for automated image processing, data acquisition and control applications in extreme environments. These controllers feature up to a 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 dual-core processor, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, 64 GB storage, four Power over Ethernet (PoE) GigE ports, two USB 3.0 ports and two DisplayPorts in a rugged design with no moving parts, and now with an IP rating up to IP67. Industrial Controllers also include a user-programmable Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, which improves system performance by providing custom I/O timing, synchronization, control and image coprocessing capabilities.

“NI’s Industrial Controllers have a robust set of I/O resources that allow us to use one controller for every facet of our automation needs including testing, vision, motion control and digital I/O,” said Jordan Larson, manufacturing engineer at Federal-Mogul Powertrain. “By utilizing the built-in EtherCAT Master for motion and conditioned I/O, we have greatly reduced the wiring and debugging time of the automation machines that we build. With Industrial Controllers, we also have brought the cost per camera down tremendously compared to other cameras previously used for machine vision. Using NI’s Industrial Controllers, we have reduced the number of components inside our machines and have all our control software on one platform, which was something we were unable to do previously.”

Industrial Controllers are part of a growing number of products from NI that support Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), the next evolution of the IEEE 802.1 Ethernet standard that delivers distributed time synchronization, low latency and convergence of time-critical and general networking traffic. In addition to using TSN for controller-to-controller communication, engineers can also integrate highly synchronized sensor measurements using the new TSN-enabled CompactDAQ Chassis released earlier this year.