For Visual Studio.NET users with framegrabbers

[wbadry]

Hi community,

    I recently bought NI PCI 8252 firewire framegrabber with Basler 601fc Color camera. This configuration seemed optimum for machine vision operations that involves natural products inspection.The problem is as follows:

     Even though the camera were tested on MAX and Vision Assistant very well (to be honest, some destotion of the image due to lens is  a challenge that I'm about to overcome), the interface on VS.NET didn't detect it as "cam0" as it appears in MAX.

    I managed to use IMAQdx API to grab the image on the CWIMAQViewer, but IMAQ framegrabber is supposed to make it avilable on "interface list" on NI-IMAQ component on VS.NET

   All help is appreciated. 

[seVEMes]

You are not going to see the "cam0" in the interface list. Have you used the examples in the <root directory>\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\National Instruments\NI-IMAQdx\Examples\MSVB.NET folder? Are you programing in VB? If these examples don't help let me know how much use they were to you.

[wbadry]

Hello Vince and thanks for your response. IMAQ examples using VB.NET is something beyond amazing. It could enrich any .NET developer who is totally ignorant of Image Processing and Machine Vision Applications ( I was that one) with loads of easy to use code patterns. NI Vision Manual makes it easy to become an expert in this domain only in short period.

NI Vision Team provided an extraordinary documentation for VIsion Module. However, I was disappointed bot to be able to grab an image without diving inside IMAQdx APIs even though I use NI PCI 8252 framegrabber that is expected to make life easier than other framegrabbers (It is a theme for NI products that I made use of it over years).

I Used IMAQ Vision Acquisition 8.6. But apparently, Inside VS.NET environment, having the ease of just selecting camera is still dream.

What do I need to have to make my camera appear in INterface List ? Newer Framegrabber?

Thanks Again to all Vision Team and Community.

P.S.: I do use VB.NET as my language preference  

Message Edited by VBCoder on 12-16-2008 10:34 AM

[seVEMes · Accepted solution]

The cameras are not going to show up in the interface list because
they are not interfaces. The framegrabbers are interfaces, that is why
they show up in the interface list. I looked throught the NI-IMAQdx
Function Reference Help (Located at <root directory>\Program
Files\National Instruments\NI-IMAQdx\Docs) and after searching with the
word 'enumerate' I found the IMAQdxEnumerateCameras function. Here is
what it says:

Returns a list of all cameras on the host computer. If you do not know in
advance the number of cameras, complete the following steps:

IMAQdxEnumerateCameras

1. Call this function with the cameraInformationArray
   parameter set to NULL. The necessary size is then stored in
   count.
2. Allocate cameraInformationArray with the given size.
3. Call this function again using the previously allocated array.

See the help for the rest of the details. I hope this is sufficient.

[wbadry]

Thanks Vince and seVEMes for your venerable help. It is for sure a good point to start from, however, I hope that you support PCI framegrabbers in the VS environment in your future releases (select and apply fashion).