Pixelink PL-A653 problem

[Nico_MPI]

Hello!
 I have a Pixelink PL-A653 firewire CCD, that it is NOT DCAM compliant, and therefore does not show up under Vision Assistant as firewire camera. The weird thing is that I can actually access it as an USB camera, ant it seems working fine, but when I am acquiring from the camera I sometime get random errors that crash Labview (v8.0).
What could be the cause? I am suspecting that reading/writing from COM ports while acquiring might cause the crash, did anybody experience the same?

Thanks,

Nicola

[Mike.J.M]

Hi Nicola,

Do you have the PixeLINK SDK?  It includes VI wrappers for the PL-A650 cameras.

Mike.

[Nico_MPI]

Hello Mike,
 no, I don't have the PixeLINK SDK. I am planning to buy a DCAM compliant camera and use the LV driver instead. Are you using the PixeLINK SDK? In case, did you have any instability problem when performing RS232 I/O operations simultaneously to image acquisition?

Bye,

Nicola

[GARCIA_CHIH]

Nicola:

You need the SDK to work with these cameras as they are not directly supported by NI. Im using the PLA654 via firewire. The SDK installs Labview icons to configure, capture and initialize the cameras.

For my experience (5+  years using these cameras) is to migrate to a USB camera. New motherboards have less PCI slots to install firewire cards (in case yours doesnot have Firewire in the MOBO) and Pixelink is not producing these cameras (PLA654 and PLA653). They have the USB version but not at board level.

There are more camera makers that support NI Labview like Matrix Vision, Lumenera, etc. They have cameras at 1280 x 1024 resolution at a very good price

Armando

[Nico_MPI]

Hi Armando,
 thanks for the comments, meanwhile a new clean install of Labview greatly reduced my crashing problem.
I think I am not going for the SDK, when I'll change the CCD I'll probably choose one supported by NI.

By the way, can you also access your camera as a USB device, without the SDK VIs? By using the USB camera VIs (not officially supported by NI) I can manage to perform all the basic operations, but if I cannot programmatically configure the acquisition (e.g. exposure time).

Nicola