How to create driver to communicate Ethernet USB/RNDIS device to LabVIEW?

[djboy]

Hi! I'm trying to get a Fluke Ti400 Thermal Imager to open in LabVIEW. What I essentially need is to display the video playback from the onboard screen into LabVIEW. The cable provided is a USB A to a USB 2.0.

Usually, I believe an SDK is required to communicate and transfer data to LabVIEW, which I had done earlier with another thermal Imager(which is not with me, hence I have to resort to using this one). Fluke provides software called Fluke Connect and SmartView to view the thermal images, hence I believe as the device can communicate with Windows there must be a way to call it into Labview using its drivers.

The first issue is that the device doesn't show up as a USB device but rather shows up in the network adapters(USB Ethernet/RNDIS Device), and hence it won't show up in the example LabVIEW VI to grab images from a USB camera. Hence I got some advice that I could use NI-VISA and the device drivers to create a VI to call the device into LabVIEW. But I don't know the first clue on how to do that. Hence, any help on how to proceed would be really helpful!

I  am using LabVIEW 2021. I have added a screenshot of the device manager.

[rolfk]

This seems to be an USB port that installs as a network adapter. This means that you will almost certainly need to address it through network communication. This network adapter will likely be visible in your Network configuration and there you can setup its TCP/IP IPv4 configuration such as what IP address it will use.

Then you will need to find out what higher level protocol it implements. It will very likely use binary messages to control the camera and stream the data in binary packages to your system. And without documentation of that binary data protocol you can pretty much forget to access it in this way.

Fluke seems not to have any public documentation about this anywhere and the only way they want you to use this device with a computer is to use their own Fluke Connect software. Maybe this software uses a .Net assembly to do the connection and then there is a small chance that you could connect to that .Net assembly with the LabVIEW .Net nodes. But even that will likely require some additional information about the API to be really usable, and if you can get that information from Fluke or not is not clear.

[djboy]

Thank you so much! I will give it a try this way and see what happens. I hope to be back with some developments. This should be a good starting point .

[djboy]

Just an update, I know it's been a very long time. But the driver creation was going nowhere and I had a deadline. So since my camera had an HDMI output, I just used an HDMI to USB capture card(Frame Grabber) and it basically converted the thermal imager to a USB camera which I could then use to display the video in LabVIEW. This was a sort of quick fix for me and basically helped my requirements.

Thanks for all the help!