GigE camera not found in MAX

[parmstrong42]

Hi all,

I am having trouble setting up a GigE based vision system.  I have set up a dozen of these system in the past, but I've never had this much trouble before.  This is the first time that I have tried setting it up the system on a corporate-networked machine and I am suspecting firewall problems.  No devices appear under NI-IMAQdx (NI-IMAQdx does not show up in the list, but I assume this would be true if no cameras are discovered).

I am using an Intel Pro 1000 NIC (four port to be exact).  The driver for that NIC (again, all four ports) is listed in the driver page as National Instruments GigE Vision Adapter.  The cameras are AVT GC series cameras.  I'm running Windows 7.  Each port is assigned to a different (static) subnet (192.168.xx.2, 192.168.yy.2, etc) and the cameras attached are configured similarly (static IP addresses).  Each camera responds properly to a ping and images from each camera can be acquired by the AVT GigE Viewer.  That tends to tell me that the network configuration is OK.  I have uninstalled the AVT software to ensure there are no conflicts with NI drivers, but I've never had problems with that in the past. 

I'm sort of left with Windows Firewall as the problem.  Typically my machines are on a trusted SCADA network, so firewalls are disabled.  The customer really wants this computer on the corporate network, so here we are.  I've poked all sorts of holes in the firewall for specific programs, but I know from experience and other posts that this is insufficient. I understand that you either need to disable the firewall completely (not allowed by group policy enforcement, even for individual adapters) or use the NI high perfomance driver.  My understanding is that the high performance driver should not be affected by the firewall, so perhaps my question is how can I be sure that I have the high perfomance driver installed and not some other NI vision driver?  The driver date is in 2009, but Max and IMAQdx were installed by LabVIEW 2010 SP1 disks.  As I stated previously, the driver in the Networking Properties window is shown as National Instruments GigE Vision Adapter, so I thought that I would be good.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[LightWorker]

I had a similar problem with a 2 port network card and e2v linescan cameras. In the end I used just one port and a network hub to communicate with the cameras. This seemed to work.

[Kira_T]

Hi parmstrong42,

Have you seen this tutorial on troubleshooting GigE Camera connectivity? This tutorial describes how to install the High Performance driver.  Please feel free to post back if none of these steps help to make your camera visible in Measurement & Automation Explorer.  

Regards,

Kira T

[BlueCheese]

Can you include a printout of your ip configuration settings? It is possible that a misconfiguration of the subnet mask between the camera and host could prevent the discovery. The Windows Firewall should not affect the discovery of the camera.

As another option, is there a reason you want each port configured with a different subnet? You could let all ports and all cameras fall back to link-local addresses. On Windows 7 this works perfectly, regardless of how many ports you use. This eliminates the configuration hassle of assigning addresses and matching cameras to each configured port.

Eric

[parmstrong42]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Kira... I have been through that tutorial.  I installed IMAQ and MAX through the LabVIEW 2010 disks, which I presume should place the high performance driver on the computer (if so selected on the driver disk installation page).  To be sure, I downloaded the vision acquisition software from the driver dowload page and installed it.  The file I selected was VASMarch2010.zip. I ran that program and nothing installed because everything was the same or more recent.

I did try an experiment with a working system.  The system was as described earlier except the OS was Windows XP.  This is a system that originally had the firewall disabled.  I fired up MAX and the cameras could be located.  I quit MAX, enabled the firewall and fired up MAX again.  Sure enough the camera's were found and my application ran fine.  This tends to tell me that either my network configuration is messed up, Windows 7 firewall behaves differently than XP (this I doubt), or I don't have the high performance driver installed.

I'll start with the driver.  I looked in MAX under the My System\Software tree.  The installed software shown was IMAQdx 3.7, IMAQ 4.5, Vision Runtime 2010 SP1 and LabVIEW Runtime.  I'm not sure if it is significant, but Vision Remote Server was not listed as an option under the Firewall exception page on the non-working system.  Is Vision Remote Server required for basic camera functionality?  The driver that is listed under the driver tab of the adapter properties was National Instruments driver version 1.4.1.49158, dated March 11, 2009.  The adapter was listed as a "National Instruments GigE Vision Adapter".  Interestingly, the system that does work with the firewall is version 1.1.2.49158, dated 11/5/2007.  I tend to doubt that it is the driver.

As far as network configuration goes, I can successfully ping each camera on the separate subnets.  If I do a route print, each adapter comes back with a 192.168.17x.1 address, where x is the port number, 1-4.  Each adapter has a 255.255.255.0 net mask, as does each camera.  Cameras are assigned 192.168.17x.2 addresses, and are plugged in to the proper ports.  The route print command (showing the computer's internal routing table) shows that, in each case, 192.168.17x.0 (subnet 255.255.255.0) is properly set up to go out on the adapter located at 192.168.17x.1.  To me the network configuration seems correct.

This configuration was done for historical reasons, and was guided by AVT's documentation for multiple NIC setups.  I am always willing to learn better ways of doing things, so the Link Local solution sounds intriguing.  However, I must profess my ignorance here and admit that I'm not sure how to set that up.  Do I assign each NIC a different 169.254.x.y address?  What does the subnet mask need to be for that configuration?  What does the starting IP address and subnet mask need to be on the cameras for negotiation to work?

Thanks for everyone's help thus far!!

[BlueCheese]

What subnet mask are the cameras configured to? If it doesn't match the PC then it could cause discoveries to fail even though a ping might work. To use the link-local mechanism, you would just configure all the network ports on your PC to use DHCP rather than a static IP. You would also configure the cameras to use link-local addressing and DHCP (GigE Vision specifies those as two distinct settings that can be controlled individually). Basically, you normally just leave both the computer and the cameras in their default out-of-the-box settings and everything should just work. Eric

[parmstrong42]

Eric,

We went ahead and configured the cameras and NICs as link-local on the Windows 7 machine and everything appears to be working well with that.  I went back to some older systems to try it out and couldn't get it to work.  Do you know if the Link-Local addressing works under Windows XP Pro.  We are intending on having up to four GigE camera ports running in addition to one networking port (static 192.168.x.x address), in case port count matters for the answer.

Thanks,

Paul

[BlueCheese]

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@parmstrong42 wrote:

Eric,

We went ahead and configured the cameras and NICs as link-local on the Windows 7 machine and everything appears to be working well with that.  I went back to some older systems to try it out and couldn't get it to work.  Do you know if the Link-Local addressing works under Windows XP Pro.  We are intending on having up to four GigE camera ports running in addition to one networking port (static 192.168.x.x address), in case port count matters for the answer.

Thanks,

Paul

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Link local addressing does work for Windows XP. The one exception is that the routing mechanism used for the broadcast discovery packets doesn't work properly when you have more than one adapter with link-local addresses. This prevents proper discovery of devices on more than one adapter. The workaround is to bridge all the GigE Vision ports together into a single virtual device (this is a built-in function in Windows). This allows the broadcast mechanism to work properly. If you use hardware capabable of using the High Performance Driver there is no performance penalty to doing it this way.

Eric