June 13th 2013. VTI Instruments today announced the release of the EMX-2500 Gigabit Ethernet interface for the SentinelEX PXI Express family. This device combines Ethernet’s widespread usage and robust architecture with instrumentation-specific functionality such as IEEE-1588 synchronization, and it extends Ethernet for use in VTI’s PXI Express mainframes.
“PXIe offers very high data transfer rates. However, one of the challenges in using it in data-acquisition applications is that it’s not easy to distribute measurements or synchronize with non-PXI instruments. With an Ethernet interface back to the host controller, the EMX-2500 enables our 'smart' PXIe modules to be seamlessly integrated with other LAN/LXI instrumentation. It also facilitates a distributed architecture allowing the PXIe instrumentation to be placed closer to the test article, resulting in tightly synchronized and highly accurate measurement results,” said Chris Gibson, data acquisition business unit manager.
EMX-2500 employs REST API, which opens new possibilities for end users to directly interface their measurement instrumentation and data with cloud services. “The RESTful HTTP protocol implementation in the EMX-2500 allows instrument control using a standard HTTP interface with JSON serialization. So, in addition to traditional instrumentation drivers which allow application programming in development environments like Labview, C/C++, C#, and Visual Basic, the RESTful HTTP implementation allows the use of popular web programming languages like Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl,” said Anirudh Narayanan, lead senior applications engineer at VTI Instruments.
“In essence, the EMX-2500 transforms a PXI Express mainframe into web-enabled smart 'thing' that can be integrated with cloud services. This opens a complete new realm of capabilities for us – for example in infrastructure, machine health and environmental monitoring applications. The IP we’ve developed with this product is being leveraged across many of our new developments. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities still to come,” continued Mr. Narayanan.