General-Purpose I/O Ports

You can use the general-purpose I/O port structure for programmable logic controller (PLC) functions or for simple point I/O. Refer to Analog & Digital I/O VIs for information about how to configure the direction and polarity of the I/O ports and bits, set and reset individual bits, and read the logical port status.

These I/O ports are also hardware resources, but because they are never mapped to axes, they are not considered motion resources. Refer to 73xx Controller General-Purpose I/O Port IDs and NI SoftMotion Controller General-Purpose I/O Port IDs for I/O port resource numbers.

Notes The RTSI port is not supported by the NI SoftMotion Controller. The resource ID for the RTSI port is 0x09 (9).

Using Unlisted General-Purpose I/O Ports

Complete the following steps to use unlisted general-purpose I/O ports:

1. Open the desired VI in LabVIEW.
2. View the block diagram.
3. Right-click the appropriate terminal and select Create»Constant.
4. Click the drop-down arrow on the constant and select Other.
5. Type the selected port number, in decimal.

Available I/O Resources

The following table lists the I/O resources by controller type.