Playstation Eye Not Working with Labview Vision

[MechEng48]

I am working on a project and I have chosen a Playstation Eye to take pictures of a travelling hockey puck to do image processing using LabView Vision Assitant. I installed the drivers from here Code Laboratories so that my computer can use the webcam.  I also have all the IMAQdx drivers installed too. When I open up LabView Vision Assitant, it is able to see the webcam and when I press the Acquire Continuous Images button it shows a live stream from the camera. However, as soon as I press the Acquire Single Image button, it takes a picture that is completely black. I don't understand why this happens. Moreover, when I open up MAX, I see the PS3 Eye webcam under NI IMAQdx Devices. After clicking on it, I try pressing Snap or Grab but get Timeout error messages.

If anybody has any insight to this problem, it would be greatly appreciated. 

[Blake-C]

MechEng48,

The best information on this camera that I could find was found here. Unfortunately that site does not provide much information on using the PlayStation Eye with anything other than a PlayStation system. I could not find a product manual for the camera either. One of the issues that may be coming up here is that MAX loads all attributes of the camera upon acquiring an image, whether you need these attributes or not. When you acquire in LabVIEW, only the attributes you need for that acquisition are loaded. What may be happening is that MAX is looking for an attribute that your camera does not have (this may be what is affecting the dark single snap as well). All of these settings for USB cameras (I’m assuming the PS Eye is USB, I couldn’t find any info on that either) need to be Direct Show compliant. So if you can get information on the camera and find out if it is Direct Show compliant, you’ll know whether it can interface with LabVIEW or not. There is a possibility that PlayStation did not make this camera Direct Show compliant, but I haven’t found that information.

For future notice, you will be best served by posting further Vision questions in the Vision Forums. That is the devoted community for Vision systems and applications. You will get much faster responses there. If you find that your camera is Direct Show compliant and you need further help, it would be beneficial to post in the Vision Forum.