getting nkdptp.dll working

[BenoitP.]

I'm working on it ! I'm now sure that's possible to make a library of VI to control the nikon camera. I need some time because I'm only working on this project during some hours of freetime :S

I will be really interesting about your user's experience with the C# Wrapper.

[windychris]

Hi all,

great that several people around the world are currently interested in that camera control.

I as well tried that Nikon SDK with a D5100 and found as well the problem that you have only the entry point after some time.

That it is possible to perform the nikon control using labview is proven by hytek and the software they sell.

It is nice that you get their software as a trial.
However the software is quite old and there are funny errors you get and often a loss of communication. 

http://www.hytekautomation.com/Products/PTPCam.html

With the Nikon SDK you get the "sample program" in C++ where basically all the communication with the NKDPTP.dll and the commands are already integrated, however I did not find where or what is exported that you could access this from LV.

Did anyone of you experienced with c++ try the code of the sample program to manufacture an interface?

I have no experience in C ++ nor with c#.

However, for trying the c# wrapper which now seems interesting to me:

What do you recommend as software to use in combination with LV to start exploring the wrapper?

When I call the wrapper from LV the "call library function" node it does not provide me any functions in the "functions name" box.

Thanks WC 

[michael78muc]

Hello Benoit,

are you still interested in the project?

I am working on a interface for a nikon d5200 with labview, it uses the Type0009.md3 file.

Kind regards,

Michael

[windychris]

Hello folks, hello michael78muc,

our experience with the c# wrapper (not the latest version but version 0.9) now is that it works well if you call the dll using the cmd as an external programmer.

Apart from some greater efforts to customize the GUI - which was to us with zero c# knowledge very time consuming and did not work completely.

The most critical points were that if you need to save the images in a variable user-defined path we needed to write a vi that periodically checks the wrapper-targetfolder and transfers the image files to the our desired folder.

And we did not succeed in reducing the capabilities on the screen to the ones we need because we did not, in the xaml, get access to the blocks transferring the capabilities to the GUI. However, for more experienced programmers this will be perhaps easier.

And the liveview stops after taking series photos.

Apart from that, for us it works fin with the wrapper, since we would have used a separate window for the camera control.

It is interesting that the c#wrapper works with all the md3 because the commands are standardized, so perhaps, michael78muc, you can draw from it the idea how to mange that in LV as well?

Good luck and success for your project. Chris

[michael78muc]

Hi windychris,

I am running into trouble to get the nikondevice instanciated, the .net constructor tells me when I open nikoncswrapper.dll that nikondevice holds no public constructors. Can you give me a hint how you initialized the communication?

Kind regards,

Michael

[windychris]

Hello Michael,

I am sorry I cannot help.

I use the testapp.exe (modified) from the c# wrapper package and call it via cmd directly,

since I failed to get the dll access directly from LV. But I thought this was due to my limited experience about how to handle these entry points where the dll does not provide all the commands but only the entry point. This was for me the same problem as for calling the nkdptp.dll in LV

Kind regards

chris