Possible to access NI hardware from service? (without logging into a user account)

[middletongard]

I'm curious if there are any issues with accessing NI hardware from a program being run as a service (ie with no user logged in to the computer). I am about to start development on a service targeting an NI-IMAQ device, and I need to start acquiring data when the computer boots up without logging into a user account. I don't know if accessing an INTERFACE set up in NI-MAX requires that a user be logged in.

This will be run on Windows 7.

I appreciate any insight. Thanks!

[BlueCheese]

I am not sure, as I certainly have never tried it. There are a few NI services that run in this manner (some via NI's System Web Server service) and they can access the IMAQ driver for enumeration purposes, so I suspect it would work.

[middletongard · Accepted solution]

I got around to doing a basic test, and was able to successfully grab data from a camera through IMAQ and store it to the disk without needing to log in. The service launched at boot and stored plenty of data before I got the chance to log in.