more imaq usb problems

[twelvepbrs]

I'm trying to capture from a mutech pheonix 1280/C USB camera using IMAQ for USB....per the typical story on these boards; the camera works fine with the manufacturer's software but won't work with LabView or Vision Assistant:  in LabView the IMAQ USB Init gets error -1074396024 which is a "System memory error"  while trying to acquire images in vision assistant results in the "Camera Settings are not valid" dialog; my setup is as follows:

Win XP Pro SP 1

DirectX 9.0b

LabView 7.0

Vision 7.1

Vision Assistant 7.1

IMAQ for USB 1.1.1

Please help     =(

-joel

[Savageaggie]

Joel,

Thank you for writing in to us for support.  The error you are receiving has to do with a compatability issue between the camera and the architecture of DirectShow, a multimedia driver on your PC which is what our USB software is built on.  For more information on our USB software, please see the following link:

- http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/89E33B77CFE244E986256F8E004E0F13?OpenDocument

- http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/274A74A901399D0486256F32007295F9?OpenDocument

Our NI-IMAQ for USB driver was released as a free tool for our customer to use with our Vision Development Module; however it was never intended to be developed into a full driver and is not currently supported or being developed by our R&D team.  Please contact the camera manufacturer to resolve any compatibility issues with DirectShow.  We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you and your team.

Thanks,

Scott Savage - National Instruments

[twelvepbrs]

The camera claims to include direct show support; and is packaged with DS drivers:

http://www.mutech.com/phoenix1280.htm#specifications

How finicky is DS? Can something support it but not "support it all-the-way?"

[Savageaggie]

Joel,

It is possible that some of features of your camera will work while others do not.  This is a function of the version of the DirectShow driver installed on the system and the way the camera interfaces with this software.  Our NI-IMAQ for USB software was not extensively tested (as it is not a supported driver by our R&D team), so it could also be the case that the driver does not support all of the functionality of your particular camera.  Please check with the camera manufactuer for more information about how to communicate with the camera.

Thanks,

Scott Savage - National Instruments

[ciomp]

dear friends :

 I came across a right same  problem ,and come out a same error .

please  reply us more definitely?

 thanks a  lot

[rolfk]

---

@ciomp wrote:

dear friends :

 I came across a right same  problem ,and come out a same error .

please  reply us more definitely?

 thanks a  lot

---

I don't think someone from National Instruments can give you a "more definitely" answer than what has already been given.

For one IMAQ for USB is unsupported software. This means someone at NI has probably spend some considerable privat time in developing this piece of software and wanted it to be available to potential users. But NI decided that this is not something they want to sell for money nor that they can justify doing support, improvements, quality control and full documentation when giving it away for free.

The choices are then very simple: Either claim that there isn't something like this available and you have to look elsewhere or make it available with the big warning that it is unsupported and that if you are happy with it that is nice but if you have problems with it that there is no guarantee at all to get support in any form.

Personally I think some of the AEs from NI already go out of their way by still answering questions about IMAQ for USB rather extensively and with quite a lot of technical understanding and they really deserve a big thanks for that, but trying to get more out of them is more likely to get IMAQ for USB completely pulled from the downloads than getting it to the standards of a real product, which by the way most probably won't be for free anymore.

If IMAQ for USB doesn't work for you then you can always look for IVision at http://www.hytekautomation.com/Products/IVision.html or try to use some ActiveX control with DirectX camera support, though integrating an ActiveX control into LabVIEW for image acquisition isn't trivial at all and I would guess IVision would be a very good investment instead of trying to do your own ActiveX interface. You can download a trial version of IVision though to see if it works for you.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[TCPlomp]

Hi Joel,

as Rolf stated the IMAQ USB-tool is 'as is'

Well almost, the problem you are encountering have most likely to do with you Windows language...

see this thread:
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=154541

Where there is a walkthrough to fix this problem (or you could expand the solution to your language)

Good luck,

Ton

PS Why can't I link to another thread??

Message Edited by TonP on 03-12-2006 09:42 PM

Message Edited by TonP on 03-12-2006 09:43 PM

[rolfk]

---

@TonP wrote:
Hi Joel,

as Rolf stated the IMAQ USB-tool is 'as is'

Well almost, the problem you are encountering have most likely to do with you Windows language...

see this thread:
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=154541

Where there is a walkthrough to fix this problem (or you could expand the solution to your language)

---

I'm not sure if this is really true but there were claims in the threads about IMAQ for USB problems with non English Windows installations that it was a specific XP SP2 problem and SP1 didn't have that issue. This would at least for the original poster mean that he has a different problem.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[cyndiego]

Hi, we are also having this problem, and the Mutech people refuse to help. So I'm wondering if any other suckers who bought this camera out there have figured out a fix? We have a brand new Labview and Vision Assistant module, and it's all in english. With either our labview vi (which works great with a cheap webcam, ironically enough) or Vision Assistant, we get an error in the IMAQ USB Init.vi (node 0x140). The strange thing is that when we first open Vision Assistant we CAN capture with it (although the video properties button is unavailable), but when we switch between image analysis and back to capture we get the error. And we always get the error with labview.

I know this isn't really NI's problem, but any help would send a lot of good karma your way. 🙂