Vision Idea Exchange

MAX will list all of the Cameras that are attached to the PC, along with attached DAQmx Devices, VISA Devices, and other Devices.  There is a very useful DAQmx System property node that returns an I/O reference to all the DAQmx Devices, allowing the user (me) to "find the USB-6002 with serial number 12345 that I so carefully calibrated and am using in my Test".  I'd like to be able to do the same thing for Cameras -- I have multiple cameras visible in MAX, but I want my code to use a particular Camera and would like to programmatically "discover" it by enumerating the Cameras and getting relevant properties (Name, Serial Number, other ID information, potentially IMAQdx parameters) to find the Camera I want to use.

Bob Schor

Please include more default VBAI System Variables.

Common and useful system variables would include:

1) Disk Space Remaining on Target default volume (or by drive letter would be even better) in MB

     Target_C_Free = 2203

     Target_U_Free = 435000

... VBAI crashes systems too often when people fill up the hard drive.  Currently the only way to prevent this is with call LabVIEW steps even though the info is already in VBAI under the Target Info menu, just not in the system variables.

2)  Target Temperatures (very useful for NI targets but could be skipped for PC targets)

3)  CPU Utilization %

4)  Pretty much anything you already have in System Info under NIMax would be very useful ... Port IP Addresses, MAC Addresses, Firmware Versions, OS , serial #,  network devices, etc. 

No need to kill the CPU updating these every 10msec. 

5)  And finally an "on event" Boolean flag to snapshot the event log into a string array would be fantastic for troubleshooting.  Currently I can only see the event log when in Config mode which isn't nearly as useful.

I noticed different cameras have different names for setting exposure time. Here's some examples:

• CameraAttributes::AcquisitionControl::ExposureTime
• CameraAttributes::Exposure::Value
• CameraAttributes::AcquisitionTrigger::ExposureTimeRaw
• etc

It would be really great if there was a way to have one function "Set Exposure" that would work for most cameras. This is analogous to how in IVI, you can have generic instruments and use the generic drivers to control them. Maybe we could assemble some sort of user driven database file we could download to provide a look up for the correct attribute for a given camera.

Another option is to iterate through the list and see if any of those attributes are present on the given camera and apply the setting to the one that's matched.

There's other really common settings like exposure mode (auto vs manual), gamma, gain, pixel format, etc