USB webcam + LabVIEW 8.2

[J.H]

Hello,

First of all, i apologize about my english !

I'm using LabVIEW 8.2 with VDM 8.0

I developed tracking system with a 1394b camera. In order to decrease cost, i want to do the same but using a USB cam.
After browsing differents discussions, it appears that it's possible to use webcam with IMAQ for USB driver.
However, many problems seems occur and i wonder what is the best webcam which work well with LabVIEW ?

All my program needs to do is to control the camera gain and shutter, with a 640*480 resolution and a framerate of 30 i/s (or higher, 60 i/s is better for me).

If someone knows webcam which allow to do this, I'm very interested to know which model !!

Thank you for your help !

Best regards
Jérôme

[Kyle_V]

Hello J.H.

The NI-IMAQ for USB Cameras driver is not full featured nor is it suppored by NI.  Instead, I would stay with the NI-IMAQdx driver and use a IEEE 1394 webcam.  You can find several IEEE 1394 webcams that are cheap and still offer the features that you need.  Here is a sight I refer to often:

http://damien.douxchamps.net/ieee1394/cameras/index.php

In particular, you might consider trying the Unibrain Fire-i.  It's $90 and I know it works well with the NI-IMAQdx driver.  It's not rugged and the images aren't going to be great, but for the money, it's hard to beat.

Kyle V.

[J.H]

Thank you Kyle for your help.

I didn't think 1394a cam could cost less than 100 $. I will take a careful look to your internet link !

Great advice !

Thank you !

Jérôme

[pallen]

We're using the OEM versions of cameras found here:

http://www.unibrain.com/Products/VisionImg/Fire_i_DC.htm

With pretty good success too.  We have had a couple of cameras arrive D.O.A.  But the company exchanged them without problem.  LabVIEW seems to play nice with them.


Good luck with your project.

[J.H]

Thank you Kyle and Pallen about yours advices !

Now I'm looking for cheap 1394a cam with framerate of 60 i/s  !! Thanks to yours previous advices, i think this will be easy to find it !

Thank you again !

[SteveP]

Regarding the Unibrain Fire-i camera, I came across this info from (6/2005).  It's not clear from the Unibrain web site history if the Februart 2007 version has made other changes.

http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Board/Imaging/Number/462578/page/10/view/c...

problems:
- the left part of each frame is darkened on alternate lines because of a voltage drop when the firewire controller sends data. This only shows up at high gain/ low light conditions.
- The frame contains diagonal noise, probably from the onboard DC-DC converter circuit. This shows up at high gain / low light conditions.
- The frame has only 128 grey levels instead of 256 because of a controller bug in the Texas Instruments TSB15LV01 chip used on that board.

And a reply from Unibrain :

"we have worked on the noise issue.
We not only changed some analog parts of the camera, we also moved to a new factory/manufacturer which has much higher quality process and production.
(The problem with so low cost cameras is to keep a consistency in the production. There will always be some differences between each unit but we tried to eliminate this as much as possible).

Regarding the TSB15LV01 color bit bug, unfortunately it has not been fixed since TI is not interested on fixing it with a new revision of the chip.

All cameras produced since February 2005, are from the new improved design and facility."