USB Cameras with Vison Development Module

[ScotchTape]

Does anyone have any experience using USB cameras with the Vision Development Module for VB.Net? 

I'm working on a vision system that is testing a USB camera based product and I need code samples of how to get images into the VB.Net NationalInstuments.CWIMAQControls.CWIMAQImage object.

Up to this point I've been trying to develop the application within LabVIEW (using the non-supported USB driver), however, I've run into other issues with LabVIEW objects that is preventing me from turning my project into an EXE for distribution onto the test systems.

Any help or suggestions would be really appreicated!!

[JohannS]

The free USB cameras driver does not have a .NET interop. The .NET support is only available for FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet cameras which ship as part of Vision Acquisition Software.

Sorry,

JohannS

[ScotchTape]

JohannS,

I'm not sure I understand your answer.  Would you please explain a little more?

Note:  I've also tried turning the LabVIEW USB drivers into a DLL.  For some reason that doesn't work either.  I built a real simple VI that returns the number of available USB devices (see attached code).  Within the LabVIEW environment it correctly returns 1.  When I build into a DLL and call it using a simple VB project I get 0 returned.  Any ideas what's going on here?

Thanks again

[Luke H]

ScotchTape,

It shouldn't be too much trouble to convert the data to an IMAQ Image data type once you get the image data into VB.NET.  You could use the IMAQ Array to Image function to do this conversion.

The difficult part will more likely be actually interfacing the camera to VB.NET.  The IMAQ USB driver for LabVIEW interfaces with Microsoft's DirectShow.  In order to get images from your camera, you will probably either need to write code to interface with DirectShow or use a dll that your camera manufacturer provides.  Below is more information about DirectShow:

Wikipedia: DirectShow

MSDN: DirectShow

Regards,
Luke H