Real-Time System Integration Bus (RTSI)

RTSI is a dedicated high-speed digital bus designed to facilitate system integration by low-level, high-speed, real-time communication between National Instruments devices.

Many applications, such as scanning and alignment, synchronize measurements made with data and image acquisition devices with position and velocity. This synchronization requires high speeds with low latencies.

Using RTSI, the NI motion controller can share high-speed digital signals with NI data acquisition devices, NI image acquisition devices, digital I/O, or other NI motion devices with no external cabling and without consuming bandwidth on the host bus. The RTSI bus also has built-in switching, so you can route signals to and from the bus on-the-fly using software.

In addition to the breakpoint and high speed capture signals, you can route encoder pulses over the RTSI lines, which serves as a way to trigger an external device on every change in the encoder channels. You can route phase A, phase B, and the index pulse of the encoder over RTSI.

You also can create a software trigger by writing to the RTSI lines directly from software.

You can route position breakpoints and encoder pulses using the RTSI bus to trigger other devices. You also can configure data and image acquisition devices to trigger high-speed captures on the NI motion controllers using the RTSI bus.