Hi there. Thanks for joining us today for the intro to PXI webinar, I'm Lean, and this is Austin. And we're here to help you step into the world of PXI. We're going to be introducing PXI, talking about what it is, what a PXI test system looks like, including software, what its benefits are and when you'd use it. We're also going to walk through a couple of demos so that you get to see it for yourself. Austin, do you want to start this? Off. Yeah, absolutely. So just to put things in perspective, PXI is basically just a computer for engineers like many of you like me and I as well. We have at our desks, our laptops, our desktops, and then some box instruments that we use, DMMS, oscilloscopes, things like that. And basically PXI is just a combination of all those things in one platform. So going through PXI, the 1st place I'm going to start is the chassis itself. The the chassis is basically the the spine of of the PXI. Or if I'm sticking with the the computer analogy, it's the motherboard. Yep. And so basically all of the different modules or instruments plug into the the chassis, it's going to deal with all the cooling, it's going to deal with all of the synchronization of of the the modules. It's got several different timing lines that that help keep that synchronization. And then the big thing that it does is it helps with the communication between the modules and then the computer. So it facilitates that communication. And then there's two different flavors of chassis. This chassis is a remotely controlled chassis. So basically with this one you'll have your laptop, and then you'll connect to this chassis over Thunderbolt, over USBC and so then your laptop will be what's actually communicating with the modules through the chassis. Controlling. It yeah, exactly, exactly. So. And then there's this version which actually has an embedded controller. So if you see this first area here is an embedded controller, which is basically just a computer, so it runs Windows or Linux. RT has a processor, hard drive, USB slots, all the things that you would expect there, a computer exactly, and some of them are very powerful computers, which we'll talk about a little bit more later. But the benefits of that being that you can, this is a stand alone device, you can mount this in a rack, it's got everything it needs to continue testing and run for long periods of time. Whereas the benefits of this one is that you can have it in an area potentially like a validation lab and then many different people can come up, plug their laptop into it and then be able to use the different instruments if they need to. So definitely pros and cons of each. The next thing is that I want to talk about is all the different instruments that we have. So we have a huge range of different instruments like all the classics, the oscilloscopes, DMMS, waveform generators, Smus along with some need acquisition modules, some sensor specific modules, some interface modules like can GPIB, things like that. So all the things that you would need to set up a system specific tree application that basically custom made for what you need. You've got options. Yeah, exactly. You have lots of options. So in each of those categories, if I say SMU's, you've got a ton of SMU options to get you to the exact price point and exact specifications that you need. The other thing is that since a computer is required for PXI, whether it's a laptop or an external computer, or whether it's embedded computer, software is a really big thing with PXI. Yeah, we have to talk about software exactly. And the good news is with PXI software you have options as well. You get to choose how you want to interact with these instruments and control them. So if you need to take a quick measurement, you don't want to spend any time programming, you can use Instrument Studio. Instrument Studio is a free software and it's pretty much we're gonna see it in action later. But it's pretty much the equivalent of the display and the knobs and the dials that are usually on a traditional box but in software form. And it's meant to help you get to that first measurement within minutes. As you can see, our PXI modules are kind of thin. That's why you can fit so many of them. But what we couldn't fit was the display, the knobs, the dials. So we don't have that tactile feel to it. But we've made sure that all that functionality and more is within Instrument Studio. Now, if you want to program, you need to have more control. You have repeated measurements that you want to automate. You also have options with what to program. Now if you're watching this webinar, likely you've heard of LabVIEW. LabVIEW is our graphical programming environment that was built for engineers, but more specifically it was optimized for automated test and measurement, so it's the perfect companion to PXI. And if you want to use other languages as well, depending on the instruments and modules, we do have API drivers for other languages like Python, CCC, NET, MATLAB. So many choices. So many. Choices. Yeah, whatever you're already working with. You could probably use PXI with it. Now sometimes while you're working within your workflow, you'll want to take a quick measurement without programming, but then later actually to program or build a full automated test suite. And that's when Test Workflow comes in. Test Workflow is a bundle of software which includes LabVIEW and other software ranging from programming to no code. That'll help you take quick measurements or automate a test suite or even build web applications to access your test from your phone, for example, remotely, and can even help you visualize and analyze your data sets. So with Test Workflow you have different tools and you get to use the right tool for the right job as you go along. Now as you can see on the slide, PXI is not new. PXI has actually been around for a super successful 25 years. We're celebrating 25 years this year and it's become a leading industry standard for modular automated test with over 2000 products being sold from over 60 different vendors. Now I like to say that PXI is 24 years young because it's still going strong and is always keeping up with technology. So you can see the image that we're showing on the slide. It's the first PXI that was announced back in 1997. It was based on an Intel Pentium processor with a 166 megahertz speed and 16 megabytes of RAM. Also has a floppy disk if you can see if you remember what that is. Barely, yeah. Barely, whereas today. Yeah. So today we obviously have a much more complex controller. We actually are using the Intel Xion processor with 18 cores compared to the one core that was originally out. And then we also have the 64 gigabytes of RAM capacity and up to 2025 gigabytes, sorry, 24 gigabytes per second bandwidth. So that's allowing you to send, you know, you could have many, many scopes sending data through the chassis and be able to collect it all with that controller. So that's our top of the line controller and it's not like we went from the original jumped right to. There. It's not our only update. No, it's not our only update. We've been slowly incrementing the controllers as Intel releases new processors. We're making sure that we stay up to date basically to make sure that we can keep up with all the cutting edge applications that our customers are doing. OK, So now let's talk about the advantages of PXI, so specifically against traditional box instruments. So the first one is obviously that they're very high performance and that's difficult because obviously there's some extremely high performance box instruments. So what I mean by that are PXI modular instruments do have a very high quality or very high quality, but the real edge that they have is the bandwidth and the latency. So PXI is famous for high channel count applications. So for example, our SMU's in an 18 slot chassis, you can fit 408 SMU channels in 118 slot chassis. That's going to be an incredible amount of data being sent back and forth to the controller that needs a ton of bandwidth to send all of that and then be able to do processing and things like that. So that bandwidth is really important. And then the other part of that is latency, because you're getting all this data and then sometimes you have to respond to that. If something comes in, you need to be able to. When the input comes in, you need an output, some sort of action that follows lag exactly without a ton of lag. That low latency allows you to perform certain high performance applications that you couldn't if you had a high amount of latency, and then the fact that the PXI chassis backplane has all the timing built in. So you're able to synchronize all those instruments to a very, very fine amount of precision. And that helps a lot in those types of applications. High performance means a lot in this case. Yes, it means many, many different things. And then the next thing is a modular form factor. So what I mean by that is if you look at this, all this can be bought piece meal. So you buy the chassis that works best for you, you buy the controller that works best for you, you buy the different instruments that work best for you and generally you buy them based on a certain specification. You have a dot and you say I need to have this sample rate, this, this, this. But specifications change, they will often change. So what you can do is if it changes and now you need a higher bandwidth oscilloscope, what you can do is you can just take out the current oscilloscope, put in a new one that has the new specifications, and you don't even need to go back and change your code because the NI scope driver works for all the different scopes, so it's going to be the same calls. So it's basically just going to be a swap, a plug and play switch to this new scope, which gives you a lot of flexibility overall and future proofs you because sometimes the next dot that you have is the same, but they've added a Bluetooth chip on there and now you just need to add in a PXI VST or an RF module that you can now start testing that So you don't have to start from scratch every single time. You can make small adjustments based on what you need while still having all the other functionality of the PXI and you're not constantly having to rebuild your code base every single time. Saves you time and you're not buying box after box after box. Yeah, stacking them up and then just taking the ones that no longer work and putting them to the side. Yeah. And I think naturally with modularity, what we end up with kind of segued into this is reduced size and space that's taken up. So we can see right here, even on the image that's on the slides, on the image, on the slides, we have a PXI chassis that fits up to 15 instruments in the same space that maybe three boxes or four boxes would have fit. So that's pretty convenient from a size, weight, space factor. But there's more to that. There's also the fact that PXI eliminates redundancy. The redundancy of having different displays, a display for each instrument, controls of knobs and dials for each instrument, power needs also processors. You don't need a different processor for each. It's all in that one system. So with that redundancy gone, plus the modularity that you walked us through, it really does lower the total cost of ownership. And waste over the world. And waste, yeah, definitely. Now when we're talking about PXI advantages, we have to talk about software as well. It's definitely a differentiator. We already talked a little bit about the different options You have, the different software that you can use to work with it. But more than that, usually with a traditional box instrument, it'll come with a slightly rigid software architecture with these predefined functionalities. And if you don't want to be limited to the predefined measurements that the box has, you're going to end up having to custom analyze on these large data sets of raw data. With PXI it's more flexible because you have software defined instruments, which means that you can take user defined measurements and custom analysis on the go in real time as you're measuring. Which is great, yeah. Absolutely. Now we see PXI used in validation and production tests across a lot of different industries, from automotive, aerospace, all the way to life sciences. So when is the right time to use PXI? Well, if you're a test engineer and you're thinking of automation, you have repeated measurements. You need to automate. If you have to work with different instruments and measure from them at the same time, or control them at the same time, if you're working with high channel counts, that's 100% when PXI is the right tool for you. If you're a design engineer and as you're working, you need to take a quick measurement probe and then continue your workflow, PXI probably isn't the answer there. But if you're thinking, you're already thinking I'm gonna use software to automate something. I'm gonna use my PC, I'm gonna use my computer. That's when you start thinking of PXI. So we've talked a lot about PXI. Austin, do you wanna show us PXI in action? Yeah, let me just set up a demo and yeah, we'll be right back. All right. So before jumping into our PXI demo, I just want to quickly show you how you can do a similar thing with box instruments. So I'm sure many of you have these types of box instruments on your desk. What I've got here is I've gotten an oscilloscope, I've got a power supply, and then I have a DMM. So what I'm doing is I have this example device under test which is actually just a Raspberry Pi and I'm powering it on with this power supply. If I come here and I hit output you can see that it is powering on. You can see that little LED, it's powering on this Raspberry Pi. And then I've programmed it so that when it powers on it's going to start outputting a PWM signal at a certain duty cycle, which I'm then going to read in with my oscilloscope. And then I'm going to use the DMM to just probe the 3.3 Volt line to make sure that that is outputting correctly. So I'm gonna do that first. So I've got this here. That's that one there. Yep. So you got it. Yep, so I got 3.3 volts. I'm having lean help me cuz I can't see it myself. So 3.3 volts there. That passes and then we can check the oscilloscope. Yep, and we can see the duty cycle there. So that would be one way to do this. If I just deployed some Python code here and I wanted to make sure everything was working properly, this would be a great way to set this up and just do some quick checks. Let's now do a similar thing, or the same thing with the PXI chassis. So let me disconnect this and then I've got this ribbon cable here to make it really easy. So I can just set this up and slide this right over the pins. Sometimes it's easier than other times I never want to make it. It's just being difficult, huh? Sometimes it just wants to be difficult. There we go. I got the trick that time. So now I've done basically the same thing in this PXI chassis. I have a DMM, I have an oscilloscope, and then I have a power supply. So in the same way I'm going to use a power supply to power on the Raspberry Pi, I'm going to use a DMM to test that 3.3 volts and then I'm going to use the oscilloscope to look at that that PWM signal. So I've actually written this piece of LabVIEW code that that does all those things. And the nice thing about this is I can just hit run and it's going to run through the different cycles. So it starts with just the test step of powering on and then so after text is powering on it's going to test their 3.3 Volt power. So you can see that down here that it is sitting at 3.3 volts very close to that. And I've I've added a bunch of weights in here so that it doesn't go too quickly because it's about 5 seconds otherwise. So you can see that passed and you can see that here and now it is checking to see if the oscilloscope measurement is correct or what we'd expect, and then we can pass that one as well. So on that one run, it went through and did all the tests that I just manually did myself. So as you probably know, this is not necessarily something that would need to be done using a PXI chat or using a PXI system. We easily could have used Skippy commands to automate these box instruments just as well using Lab View or Python or something else. So with this type of the situation, it's not necessarily used to use PXI. But let's start talking about when you would want to start using PXI. So we've got three instruments now. As you start stacking up more instruments, it starts becoming, it starts becoming more and more advantageous to use PXI. So if we added an SMU, if we added a waveform generator, let's say we also want to test the Wi-Fi, we we want to add AVST. To do that. Let's say we want to test the temperature, that would be another thing. And then if we wanted to test things and be in a synchronized fashion like we want to test the temperature as we are testing the duty cycle, we're running some sort of stress test and you want these highly synchronized measurements, then we're really seeing a large advantage by moving to PXI. That's the same thing when it comes to channel count. So if if we're just doing one of these box instrument might might be able to hold up, if we're looking at testing you know anywhere 5 to 10 at a time, PXI is going to be the much, much better option. And then if we're looking at production tests, we're looking at testing hundreds of these an hour that's that's really where where PXI is going to be very, very advantageous of reusing box instruments. So like I said, if you've if you're using a lot of different mix measurements, if synchronization or channel density is important and if if being able to quickly program that something like this is important, that's when you go to PXI. Because while you can do something similar using Skippy commands, it's going to be easier to use a PXI to write an automated test situation like this in LabVIEW just because all of the drivers are just set up to work well in LabVIEW, it's significantly easier to go through that process. So yeah, this is just to quickly demonstrate and let you see what it actually looks like to use Pxi to do something that you would normally have done with Box Instruments. Let's go back to the presentation. OK. So we've talked about PXI and we've also seen it in action. If you're now interested in it, you might be wondering where do I get started. Well, we have some PXI bundles that are low entry point. That's a great place to start from. They're all basically based on this chassis, the PX IE1083 chassis that we've been using, which is a five slot chassis that you control through Thunderbolt from your laptop. Which is great, because your laptop you're familiar with it, it's already IT approved if that's a concern. And for a first PXI system, you won't have to pay for a controller with it. So each one of these bundles comes with one instrument, so one of the slots will be filled and then four empty slots for you to later scale up your system as your project progresses. These one slots or these modules range from or include osseoscopes, Smus and LCR meters, DMMS, programmable power supplies, waveform generators, multifunction IO DAC modules, and a nanovoltmeter module. Each one of these bundles also comes with some basic IO connectivity cables. So really all you need to do is connect everything up, plug it into your laptop, and if you're using Instrument Studio, which is free, you can get to that first measurement within minutes. So let's see what that looks like. Right now I have my chassis and the scope, the Osseo scope module connected again to that same device under test that Austin was using the Raspberry Pi. That's emitting a PWM waveform. So let's move over to Instrument Studio. This is what Instrument Studio looks like. If you remember I I mentioned before that it's the equivalent of what a scope or or a traditional box instruments would have with regards to displays and controls. So here I have my Osceoscope connected here. Right here in the center we see the graph that or the the graph that we're measuring. And on the right is where you see all of your controls instead of those knobs and dials. And it's kind of intuitive to use. With my mouse I can just drag drag the signal around to get to see it, or scroll in and out to zoom in and out. And I can also use do this. Similarly with the controls on the right we have these drop down menus so I can change up my scale from right here so I can see this a little bit better. I can also, if I had, if I had channel 1, the other channel connected to something, I can simply just turn it on from here and then I can configure it from the same screen. For more advanced configuration, we can click on this gear icon right there to do things that are like triggering for example. So what we can do with this? As well as we could add a cursor. So I had these cursors already on here, let's turn them on and let's go to C1. There we go. So I have cursor one and cursor two, and as I move them along I will in real time be seeing the difference in time and the difference in voltage as I go along, which is pretty useful for quick probing measurements between two different points. If I want to save this data, I could either take a screenshot, capture a screenshot of what it looks like, or I can capture a snapshot in data form in at DMS file. Finally, you know you've used this, you've configured your your your scope. If you want to then use the same scope to take these same measurements but in an automated test, for example in LabVIEW or Test Stand, you could actually export the device the driver configurations from right here. Fun fact, that's what Austin did when he was prepping for his demo. He configured the scope right here on Instrument Studio and then exported that configuration into LabVIEW. So we've seen what it looks like to interact with one instrument with Instrument Studio right here on the screen. But if you also have other instruments in the chassis that you want to measure from and control at the same time, you could also do that from one screen. Right here we can see a scope, a digital multimeter and a power supply all in one place for us to interact with. OK. So today we talked about what PXI is, what its benefits are, and when you'd use it. We also got to see PXI in action a couple of times. So if you're interested and would like to learn more, here's a list of resources that you can check out. And now it's time for the QA section. So please ask any questions that you have. We'll both be answering questions along with some experts on our team and we'll do our very best to answer your questions. Thank you so much. Thanks.