FPGA Interface Python API

Overview

The National Instruments FPGA Interface Python API is used for communication between processor and FPGA within NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) hardware such as NI CompactRIO, NI Single-Board RIO, NI FlexRIO, and NI R Series multifunction RIO.

With the FPGA Interface Python API, developers can use LabVIEW FPGA to program the FPGA within NI hardware and communicate to it from Python running on a host computer. This gives engineers and scientists with Python expertise the ability to take advantage of compiled LabVIEW FPGA bitfiles, also the option to reuse existing Python code.

Installation

NiFpga can be installed by cloning the master branch and then in a command line in the directory of setup.py run:

pip install --pre .

Or by installing from PyPI using:

pip install nifpga

nifpga supports Python 2.7 and 3.4+. Note, Python 2.7 support will be dropped in the next non-maintenance release.

Examples

The FPGA Interface Python API is session based. LabVIEW FPGA will generate bitfiles (.lvbitx) that can be used to program the hardware. For additional information on sessions view our Read the docs documentation

Example usage of FPGA configuration functions:

with Session(bitfile="BitfilePath.lvbitx", resource="RIO0") as session:
    session.reset()
    session.run()
    my_control = session.registers["MyControl"]
    my_control.write(4)
    data = my_control.read()

See our readthedocs page for more detailed examples and documentation.