Matrox Frame Grabber Drivers

[pbj]

Hi Out There,

We want to operate our Matrox Helios HEL 1MDBCL Frame Grabber under NI-LabVIEW 8.0.1 as a Controller. The LabVIEW VI's will be used to trigger the camera and read out image data files as an automated process for our experiment. We have Matrox Imaging Library MIL 7.5 software, but not yet got the camera interfaces set-up. 

Camera is Dalsa Piranaha P2-23-08K40 an 8,192 pixel CCD line scan camera. 

We desire the software drivers to interface with NI-LabVIEW 8.0.1 and example LabVIEW VI programs under the Windows XP  operating system. 

The Matrox company tells us to search out third party software for support. I understand NI IMAQ Vision software to support the Matrox Meteor-II frame grabber. I am hoping that there are software drivers out there for our frame grabber.

Can you assist us?

Peter Jacquemin
pbj@uvic.ca
University of Victoria
Department of Mechanical Engineering Researcher

[VuD]

Hi Peter,

In regards to your question, our IMAQ driver does not currently support third party frame grabbers as explained in this document: Can I Use My Third Party Frame Grabber with the IMAQ VIs?

"Our Vision software package is completely separate from our frame grabber driver and is an extensive library of LabVIEW image processing VIs. IMAQ Vision does not care whether the images come from an NI frame grabber, a third-party frame grabber, or from a file. The Vision VIs do require the images to be formatted into a proprietary data type called an IMAQ Image. Other manufacture's frame grabbers often return an image as a 2-D array of data. This array can then be converted to the IMAQ Image format using the IMAQ ArrayToImage.vi."

In regards to a driver that is compatible with your Matrox Helios card, here are some websites I found from searching online.

Matrox Imaging

Image Mill LabVIEW & IMAQ Vision Drivers

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vu

Message Edited by Vudoo on 04-17-2007 11:24 AM

[ChristopheC]

Hi Peter,

A company called Alliance Vision offers a variety of drivers for third party acquisition devices for LabVIEW and the NI Vision Development module.

They support all Matrox framegrabbers. I've pointed them to this thread, but here's their web site in you want to get in touch with them directly.

http://www.alliancevision.com/us/index.html

As Vu mentioned, to process the images under LabVIEW, you need to get the NI Vision Development Module, which is a vision library that contains all the VIs you need to process and analyse images. It is a separate package that you have to purchase.

http://www.ni.com/vision/vdm.htm

Hope this helps. Best regards,

-Christophe