Which Card?

[Jason.Clark]

Hi,

 

 Firstly this is all new to me so apologies for the noob questions!

 

I was looking for a image capture device ( inputs will be various sources - but will be Analog) and

I stumbled across an online article of someone doing something similar who was using a IMAQ-PCI-1408 and have some questions…..

 

1. I can't find this card on the website - does it still exist or has it been updated?

 

2. My requirements are to get a screen grab and video can this or similar card do this?

 

3. Currently I have written an application to do some testing using a web cam under windows imaging devices. However to get the image grab,  it requires me to save a video and then grab a frame from the captured video.  Since the cards are labeled up as image grabbers does this get me around this technique ( cause its quite slow at the moment! 3 seconds for a grab i.e. start video/ stop video/ Read video / output frame as image..;.) hence looking for better technology - perhaps its the hardware that does the work?

 

4. Also I’m using visual studio c# -  can I interface with the card easily to get out video and pics out ( objects or filesystem) ?

 

5. Not mandatory,  but there is talk in the future on this project of perhaps looking for text in the image and checking the string found against a local database. – can this or any other card do this and is it done in the software or hardware?

 

Thanks,

[sahpe]

Hello Jason,

Let me answer your questions before I offer my personal advice if I can:

1. You are correct in that the PCI-1408 was discontinued a while ago. Newer versions include the PCI-1410 and the PCI-1411.

2. These cards grab images, and video in a way is a series of images, so they can do both I believe.

3. As per above, it would be possible to extract an image from a video.

4. All of our drivers include libraries for access through other programming languages, including C#. Whether this will be easy depends on your application and code.

5. Our software offering for Vision applications includes OCR features with which you can find text in images. This is purely a software capability which means your code will need to meet this requirement. Have a look at our tools:
https://www.ni.com/en/shop/electronic-test-instrumentation/application-software-for-electronic-test-...

You may have noticed in the links to our analog vision hardware above that there is a note reading "**Not Recommended for New Designs**" and there is a reason for that.
National Instruments will soon be discontinuing the PCI-1410 and PCI-1411 analog image acquisition devices as these products use a specific component no longer available on the market. Therefore you might want to consider the PCI-1405 analog image acquisition board, which offers support for standard analog signals but does not support nonstandard analog video.

Alternatively you can consider updating your application to one of the newer and more commonly used digital standards available including IEEE 1394 or GigE Vision or Camera Link (https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/category/machine-vision.html?productId=118305).

I hope that the above information helps,

Kind Regards,

Michael S.
Applications Engineer
NI UK & Ireland