Unable to create an installer containing IMAQdx in LabVIEW 2014

[martin.zmrhal]

I am experiencing a strange issue when building installers containing IMAQdx functionality in LV Application Builder 2014.

When I was building an installer for an executable using IMAQdx in LV 2013, Application Builder automatically selected needed additional installers and IMAQdx drivers (Vision Acquisition) were one of them. Now I am trying to build the same project in 2014, but in Additional Installers I see only NI-IMAQdx Runtime 14.0. When I build the installer in LV 2014, the folder size is approx. 300MB opposed to 900MB of the installer which has been built in LV 2013.

When I run the 2014 installer on a "clean" Windows, install and run any application which uses IMAQdx, I don't see any connected cameras. This is fixed after manually installing Vision Acquisition Software from NI Device Drivers DVD. After that I can see all cameras both in the application and in MAX.

I tried to manually add Additional Installers in LV 2014, but to no avail. It seems to me that there is no way to bundle IMAQdx drivers in LV Application Builder.

I did not find any post related to this and I wonder if someone can reproduce this behavior before I file a CAR. I attached a simple project with a simple VI and sample installers for testing purposes. The VI allows you to select a camera (e.g. a webcam) and acquire a video frames.

[MoviJOHN]

I haven't seen the 2014 release of Vision Development Module go up on the NI website yet, so am I to assume you are still using the 2013 VDM?

If this is the case, after installing LV2014 on your system (which already has LV2013 and VDM), you need to re-run the 2013 VDM install again to add the toolkit to your LV2014 Installation.  The reason for this is that when the installer is run, it only installs support for existing installations.

[desalando]

There's a new release of Vision Development Module.

http://www.ni.com/gate/gb/GB_EVALTLKTSIGPROC/US

or direct:

http://ftp.ni.com/evaluation/labview/ekit/other/downloader/VISION_2014_F1.exe

[martin.zmrhal]

I already have VDM 2014 installed (see attached screen from NI MAX). I uninstalled LV 2013 completely and did a fresh install of NI Developer Suite 2014. But I think the issue has nothing to do with VDM - I am missing the IMAQdx driver (Vision Acquisition) in the installer.

Can someone NI Developer Suite (ot LV 2014 + Vision Acuistion Software 2014) verify if he can reproduce the issue?

[Joseph-S · Accepted solution]

Hi martin.zmrhal,

What you are seeing with only the Vision Acquisition Software (VAS) runtimes available in the additional installers list is expected behavior with the latest release.

Prior to Vision Acquisition Software (VAS) August 2014, the additional installers for VAS, namely NI-IMAQ, NI-IMAQ I/O and NI-IMAQdx not only included the runtime components but also application development support for LabVIEW. In VAS August 2014 and later, we now only allow the deployment of the runtime components. This gives you the benefit of a significantly reduced installer size, but you can no longer include LabVIEW application development support (ADE) in the installer. 

This change aligns Vision with the behavior of LabVIEW and most other NI products, in that you cannot typically deploy full development support for a product, but rather only the runtime components. If you need to install VAS with ADE support onto your deployment machine, you will need to distribute the full VAS installer on that machine in addition to LabVIEW (to make use of the VAS ADE support). To do this automatically, you would have to write a batch file to run the installer for LabVIEW and then IMAQdx.

Concerning the second issue of not being able to see the camera, I believe what you are experiencing is that the dropdown of the Session In control is greyed out and that you cannot click on it to see a list of cameras on the system. This is also expected behavior for the VAS runtimes. This does not mean that the driver is not discovering cameras though, and you can test this out by typing in the camera name into the Session control (e.g. "cam0" for the first discovered camera on the system).

What we are aiming for with this behavior is for deployed vision applications to abstract away the camera selection process from end users. Ideally, your code should programatically enumerate the cameras with IMAQdx Enumerate Cameras.VI and then determine which camera (based on bus type, serial number, model number, etc) to target. We're working on an app note/white paper that explains this clearly with some examples, but the idea is similar to this community example for NI DAQmx devices: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-10014.

I do apologize for the present lack of documentation on these features, but we are definitely working on providing some useful examples and KnowledgeBase articles to address this. I'll post a link to the content as soon as it becomes available.

Also, Vision Acquisition Software August 2014 f1 went live yesterday: http://www.ni.com/download/ni-vision-acquisition-software-august-2014-f1/4974/en/. The patch only is also available via Update Service, and it is highly recommended that you upgrade if you are using the 2014 August drivers still.

Regards,

Joseph

[martin.zmrhal]

Hello Jospeh-S,

Thank you for the explanation. The new behavior will be a little limiting for us, but I guess there is not much we can do about it 🙂

You are correct about the second issue. We have been using the Session In dropdown to let the user select the camera he needs (there can be any kind of camera connected to out application). I suppose the best solution would be to develop a workaround: to enumerate all cameras and to manually populate a standart Combo Box with cameras strings. On the other hand I do not understand, why the Session In dropdown could not remain working in LV 2014 VDM Runtime...

Anyway I am looking forward to a proper documentation of what have been changed!

Regards, Martin.

[Joseph-S]

Hi Martin,

Thank you for the feedback. I've sent you a private message requesting some feedback regarding your previous use of deploying VAS development support as we would always like to understand all the use cases we may have overlooked in our decision making. Concerning the lack of the dropdown, I will also take that feedback to the team. Thanks!

Regards,

Joseph 

[Joseph-S]

Hi All,

Just wanted to close the loop. VAS Feb. 2015 has been released: http://www.ni.com/download/ni-vision-acquisition-software-february-2015/5149/en/ which once again allows VAS development support to be deployed in addition to the individual runtimes. 

Regards,

Joseph

[RashmiM]

Hi,

I am facing exactly the same issue as described by martin.zmrhal. Only difference is I am tring to detect the camera through NI Max on the windows embedded PC with LV2014 installer and it is not getting detected. If I manually install Device driver CD and reinstall, Max detects the camera. Before starting the application, I need to configure the parameters through Max and the same settings are accessed in my application. This is happening with LV2014 Feb 2015 version.

Kindly suggest the solution.

Rashmi

[Gregory]

The lack of a drop-down box also confused me greatly after upgrading LabVIEW. We often rename our cameras using NI MAX, so it is very easy for the user (usually engineers and technicians) to find the camera that they want. I would definitely like to see this functionality returned.

Also, a colleague of mine was running the development system with vision acquisition drivers (I believe 2011 or 2012) on that computer. Being responsible, I make my programs into executables to deploy them, and the IMAQdx runtime that I installed did NOT play nice with the existing development system. My colleague's program was completely broken, with no IMAQdx drivers to be found. Only a complete reinstall of the vision acquisition software fixed the problem.