Starlight Xpress USB camera via LabVIEW???

[mogensen]

Hello,

Has anyone ever controlled a Starlight Xpress astornomical USB camera via LabVIEW. I've got the Vision Developer Module and the NI-IMAQ for USB package but it doesn't seem to work. I'm not sure wether the camera is Direct Show Compliant (DSC) as the documentation for the camera is close to non-existing.

Is there any work around if the camera is not DSC? Can I get some kind of PCMCIA card to fix this?

Thanks,

Mogensen

[Irene B]

Hi Mogensen,

Probably the best way to find out if the Starlight Xpress USB camera is Direct Show Compliant is to contact the camera company directly.  I took a look at the site myself, but was unable to find any related documentation for the models I looked at.  Without the Direct Show filter, you will not be able to use the NI-IMAQ for USB driver.  You can try to find another third party driver, access the camera's DLL files directly, or write your own driver using NI VISA.

Hope this information helps; let me know if you still have any other questions about this issue.

Cheers,
Irene Chow
National Instruments
Applications Engineer

[mogensen]

Hi Irene

Thanks a lot. I'm sure I'll have a bunch of questions as I've never written my own driver before. I'll browse the KnowledgeBase first.

The camera is the MX716 (an older model) which originally used the serial connection but they supplied a serial-2-USB converter to speed up the image transfer time. I guess I can try to acces the camera via the serial line instead(?). Any reading suggestions for accessing the camera's DLL files directly?

Rebards,

Claus Mogensen

[Irene B]

Hi Claus,

If you are using LabVIEW as your programming environment, you can easily call functions from DLL files (which will depend on the API that is available for your camera's driver).  Anyway, I just did a simple search on http://ni.com for key words such as "external dll labview" and here are a couple of articles that popped up:

• An Overview of Accessing DLLs or Shared Libraries from LabVIEW
• LabVIEW Help: Calling External APIs
• LabVIEW Help: Configuring the Call Library Function Node
• LabVIEW Help: Additional Windows Examples of LabVIEW Calls to DLLs

If you decide to use serial communication, the NI-VISA software is an easy-to-use wrapper that allows you to communicate with many different kinds of protocols, such as USB, serial, Ethernet, GPIB, etc.  Please browse our website for additional resources on what NI-VISA does and how to use it.

Cheers,
Irene Chow
National Instruments
Applications Engineer

[PM7]

Hi there. Sorry to bring up an old post but I'm curious if you ever got this working? I am trying to control a Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 camera from LabVIEW. Thanks