Can the NI PCI 1428 act as a virtual com port to send commands directly to camera from MATLAB?

[centersnare30]

Hi,

I was wondering if there  is a way I can simply make the NI1428 a virtual com port or something to that affect. I would like to just send the commands to my camera through MATLAB. If any more clarification is necesary please let me know.

Thanks

[Andy_C.]

Hello~!

It is not possible to send and receive serial commands on the 1428 using the serial lines as a virtual COM port.What is it that you are trying to achieve? Are you trying to control the attributes of the camera? If so, the best bet is to use the Camera File Generator to type in the serial commands for specific attributes.

[centersnare30]

Andy,

Yes that is exactly what I am trying to do. I was using this Imperx dual port laptop image acquisition card but it was giving me a lot of problems. With that card you could set up each cameralink port as a virtual com port. Long story short I switched to a non laptop version which uses the 1428s. I wanted to see if I could leave my code the same or I had to change it.  Is this camera file generator something I can access through Matlab or I guess an even more general question is how do I access it period.

[BlueCheese]

It is completely possible to send and receive serial commands through the 1428, it just doesn't get mapped as a virtual COM port. You instead have to use the IMAQ API to do it. I'm not sure how you are interfacing with the IMAQ board in MATLAB, but somehow it has to interact with the IMAQ API and so you would have to check and see if the serial communication is exposed as well. If not, you might be able to interact with the IMAQ API directly. If for some reason the MATLAB API does not expose access to the serial communication or the underlying IMAQ API, you could likely make DLL calls from MATLAB directly into the "clallserial.dll" that is the common interface for all CameraLink hardware vendors to expose the serial interfaces.

Eric 

[VTX1800]

Eric,

Pardon the intrusion into this thread.

Left you a reply in the Ethernet/IP thread days ago.

Significant breakthrough.

Check it out.

cheers,

Ted