Grabber the IP cameras without the NI PCIe-8231?

[Iskander]

Hello all

May I grabber the IP cameras without the NI PCIe-8231?

Best regards

Iskander

[VGA_CD-ROM]

Hi Iskander,
You can use any gigabit ethernet (GigE) port to acquire from IP cameras as long as the camera complies to the GigE Vision standard and you have Vision Acquisition Software installed and activated (Vision Acquisition requires activation whenever you acquire from Firewire or GigE cameras). Whether you use one of our cards like the PCIe-8231 or any other GigE interface is up to you. If your camera is not GigE Vision compliant, then it will not work with our software. See these related links below on whether the camera conforms to teh standard:

KnowledgeBase 461BPOS4: GigE Vision Compliancy
KnowledgeBase 43CDBB0F: Compatibility Test for IEEE-1394 and GigE Cameras with NI-IMAQdx

[BlueCheese]

Hi Iskander,

Keep in mind that using a PCI-express network interface is recommended very highly. GigE Vision consumes a lot of bandwidth and normal PCI-based network cards will consume almost the entire shared bus with potentially a single camera.

Also, the PCIe-8231 is based on an Intel Pro/1000 interface, which is what our High Performance Driver requires. This can give you more performance (lower CPU usage and higher reliability) and more capabilities (bridging multiple ports) than using a different network interface.

-Eric

[Iskander]

Hi

Thanks all for the attention and answer

I understood all

Regards

Iskander

[Iskander]

Hi

I have else question

How many GIGE camers may I connect to the NI PCIe-8231?

Thanks

Iskander  

[BlueCheese]

Hi Iskander,

If you use a gigabit switch (preferably one that supports jumbo frames) you can connect any number of cameras to the PCIe-8231. There are however several considerations though because unlike firewire, there is no reservation of bus bandwidth and so you must ensure that your overall bandwidth usage stays within the 1000Mbit limit of gigabit ethernet. If you try to send too much data from multiple cameras you will end up losing data.

Unfortunately you cannot just simply use your frame size * frame rate to calculate the bandwidth needed by an individual camera as most cameras by default will send data at a higher peak rate than their average rate. This is to reduce latency from the time an image is acquired to the time it is available on the PC. On the latest versions of IMAQdx we have made available a bandwidth control that will allow you to specify the peak bandwidth the camera may use. In most cases this limit will be bounded by the average data rate determined by the frame size and frame rate (in other words, it is designed not to throttle the acquisition rate, just the transfer rate).

Additionally, for some quick burst multi-camera acquisitons you may be able to take advantage of buffering on the camera itself to allow you use an unlimited number of cameras at once and then read the image data out sequentially from each one. These types of features are generally camera-specific.

Hope this helps,

Eric

[Iskander]

Hi Eric

Thanks for the answer

Regardrs

Iskander