Replicate remote PC desktop in LabVIEW front panel

[sciawatt]

Hi,

I wonder if there is a way to replicate in a LabVIEW front panel a screenshoot, updated every 2/3 times per second, of a remote desktop. The goal is to replicate the screen image of an existing linux machine vision system (can run VNC or similar remote frame buffer tool) on a portion of front panel VI that I'm currently developing.

Many thanks!

Ragards

[Bob_Schor]

Can you get your Remote Linux System to build an Image (a 2D Array of Pixels) of its own desktop (or whatever you really want to view) and send that, via TCP/IP, to LabVIEW on the Host?  You could then use IMAQ functions to directly display these images.  Almost as easy is to get a Web Cam and "point it" at the Linux Screen, then use IMAQdx to capture (at some suitable frame rate) the WebCam images.  This involves taking a digital image of a digital image, so there might be some "funny business" ...

Bob Schor

[sciawatt]

I Bob,

Yes, getting an array of pixels could be a solution (web cam pointing at screen looks a bit unprofessional...). The ideal, without intervening to much on linux side would be getting the remote frame buffer and displaying it on LabVIEW front panel, something ready off-the-shelf would be fantastic, but maybe I'm dreaming... 

thanks so much

[sciawatt · Accepted solution]

Finally I got a possible solution.

I've merged the Bob suggestion of retrieving saved JPEG image with my initial idea of a remote frame buffer / VNC grubber. After some researches I've found the VNCsnapshot command line utility http://vncsnapshot.sourceforge.net/ and I've successfully implemented a test VI that got a linux desktop PC JPEG screenshot file and displays it into a LabVIEW picture indicator. The entire operation requires about 200 ms so my refresh rate target is fulfilled.