Trouble understanding the proper way to call DLLs, example using PXC200 Frame grabber

[weizbox]

Hello,

I have been trying to get an older frame grabber that my company owns setup to grab frames when I give it rising edge on a certain pin going into the card. I have the original example that I had gotten from CyberOptics (the company that makes the board http://www.imagenation.com) , but it just shows how to get a live stream coming from the card.

I have been trying to play around with the code some, and get the triggering to work, but I havent had much luck at all, and was wondering if anyone knew how to work with DLLs a bit more than I do that could help me figure out how to get this running, since it should be possible, as the live stream part is working fine in labview.

I have included the VI and the PDF that I had gotten from them in order to see what Im talking about. I would imagine this is more a problem of working with DLLs then it has to do with the card.

According to the documentation, and as well, an email from them when I told them of my situation...

"A common use for a trigger input on the PXC200A is to initiate a capture
when the trigger signal is detected. You can accomplish this with these
two lines of code:
pxc.WaitAnyEvent(fgh, fgh, 1, 0, QUEUED);
pxc.Grab(fgh, frh, flags);"

I would imagine this is what I could need to do, its just im not sure how to make that work within LabVIEW. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and please let me know if you would need any more details about it.

Thank you,
-Mark Wiesbock

Message Edited by weizbox on 03-15-2006 10:07 AM

[Megan B.]

Hi Mark,

It looks like you just need to call a few functions from your DLL in LabVIEW (probably using a Call Library Function Node).  There are some excellent resources to help you incorporate this external code into a VI.  First of all, check out this Overview of Accessing DLLs or Shared Libraries from LabVIEW.  There is also a large section on the Developer Zone about Integrating DLLs into LabVIEW.  This section includes application notes, tutorials, and example code.  There are even some shipping examples in the NI Example Finder (Help>>Find Examples).  If you search for "dll" you should find several examples on using DLLs in LabVIEW.

I hope this helps!  Happy coding,
Megan B.
National Instruments