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Simple frame grabber project for PCI 1433

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I'm in a bind.  I have a laptop with LV2016 pro and the vision dev module.  I also have a PC with a NI 1433 frame grabber attached to a Basler aca2040-180km camera.

 

Basler Pylon does not capture frames from CameraLink cameras (Just USB and GigE).  It only allows setting of all the serial interface features for CameraLink via the NI serial driver.

 

MAX doesn't provide much utility for capturing frames to disk (I still haven't gotten it to work).

 

Is there a VI (Or VIs) which can be built (On the laptop) into an EXE for the PC to use this hardware?  Or perhaps there's an existing application?  I really don't want to develop a custom solution just to get images saving to disk.


Thanks,

 

XL600

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Accepted by topic author xl600

Hello!

 

There are some examples that ship with LabVIEW and VDM that should help. In LabVIEW, go to Help > Find Examples > Hardware Input and Output > Vision Acquisition > File Input and Output. The Snap and Save to File.vi should accomplish what you need (or at least give you a starting point), so you could create an EXE from that or a modified version of it. The examples in the High-Level folder may also be useful.

Note, that on the deployment PC, you will need the LabVIEW RTE and Vision Acquisition Software installed for the functions to work. If you modify the example to include functions from the Vision Development Module, you will need its runtime on the PC as well.

 

Hope that helps!

Madison T
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Thanks.  I was hoping to avoid that, but there simply doesn't seem to be any packaged solutions.  So I went in and used multiple examples to create a basic sequence grabber, buffered viewer, and frame time analyzer.  Works pretty well, up to about 300fps which is fine for my application.

 

I couldn't come up with a build which didn't require VDM though.  Using just the VAS express VIs, the target machine still complained about a VDM runtime license.  Since I had one handy, I just licensed the target machine and it's happy.  The differences between VAS and VDM are a bit hard to understand and I wish NI would just rename them to something more akin to their actual use.  How about:

 

Vision Acquisition Support for LabView

Advanced Vision development and acquisition support for LabView

 

I rant....

 

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I may be completely wrong about this, but I always thought of the Vision Acquisition Software, part of the LabVIEW Driver DVD, are the routines to connect to hardware, namely to cameras.  I suspect these are the routines that allow you to interface with cameras (and frame grabbers) and import their images into LabVIEW.  I think of the Vision Development Module as the set of functions that allow you to interact with Images, including reading and writing them to/from files, essentially everything except interact with hardware.

 

I'm basing this, in part, with my experience with forgetting to activate the VAS license, and seeing all the Vision tools except the NI-IMAX and NI-IMAXdx sub-Palettes, which appeared when I activated my license.  Also on the logic in the first paragraph.

 

Bob Schor

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Yep.  I think that sums the it up pretty well.  VAS is the low level hardware side of VDM.  I just wish it were clearer.  When I hear the word “software”, I think it’s standalone and that’s all you need to capture.  But no, you also need labview and have to write code to acquire pretty much anything other than still images in max.

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The key words were "Development" and "Acquisition" -- the last words were "fluff" (it would have been too undignified to call them "Thingy").Smiley Very Happy

 

Bob Schor

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