Loosing camera while doing grab

[BlueCheese]

Rick,

If the camera is disappearing from device manager, it is unlikely to be an issue with the IMAQdx driver. Our driver is layered on top of Microsoft's OHCI 1394 driver and their driver handles the enumeration of devices and the plug & play that makes them appear in device manager.

Most likely you are running into some sort of power or signalling issue that is causing the camera to drop off until it is power cycled. You are probably on the margins of one of those items and eventually it fails. I'd try either increasing your available power by reducing the number of cameras per 1394 card, checking if your 1394 card has an auxiliiary power connector, or adding a powered firewire hub. You could also try using shorter cables.

Eric 

[Rick_vd_Z]

Eric,

The previous week we have added powered hubs to the application, and we've also switched from the quad PCI-card to a dual port PCI card. Which means that the systems now consists of two FireWire B camera's connected to a PCI-X FireWire  B card and 4 FireWire A camera's in pairs connected to this powered hub. But stil one of the FireWire A camera's disappeared from the device manage after several hours of working correctly. This time the systems worked fine for several hours, and the next time the process started again the system had been shutdown in the meantime. When the software was started, one of the camera's was missing right from the start.

Do you have any ideas what might cause this problem or suggestions what I could test? Does anybody have a system which is using FireWire B camera's ande FireWire A camera's simultaneously using the NI-IMAQdx driver without problems? My next step will be to replace the standard cable, I'm going to use this drag chain cable. 

Ric