Our
myRIO device is very interesting and we've done a number of
complementary projects with it, in addition to our lab work. Anyway,
even though we like LabVIEW, we wanted it to be programmed with
Python... and we did it!
NI
myRIO is designed to be programmed with LabVIEW. It has an API to
program it in C, but it has no maintenance, and the links it haven't
worked for a long time. Knowing this, and out of curiosity, we decided
to explore another third opportunity, Python.
Python is one of
the most fashionable programming languages (I'd mention JavaScript and
Rust) and we know it can be used because it is mentioned when installing
the myRIO Linux image.
Knowing that, we started searching and found the nifpga Python package.
https://pypi.org/project/nifpga/
This library allows you to read FPGA registers. Based on the default configuration of myRIO's FPGA, we started testing it and bingo! It worked. Knowing this, we gradually developed an entire Python library that could be used to program the myRIO both locally (connected by ssh) and remotely (from our PC). This library is called myRIO-library and is available here:
myRIO-library PYPI.org
https://pypi.org/project/myRIO-library/
myRIO-library GitHub
https://github.com/AitzolEzeizaUPVEHU/myRIO_library
We'll talk more about this topic, because we'll use it as an excuse to learn Python.