USB DRIVER FOR IMAQ

[Marek_K]

Brad,
you are GREAT !!  My USB camera works now under WIN XP SP2 PL with LV7.1
You have undersdood, that in the string, the second dot in "..." is a letter.  I did not see it.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH !!!
Marek

[Brad]

Hello Nuno,

The source for this driver is not available for download. It uses our IMAQ Image and so it has some internal functions for using our internal image data type, which is not public.

Brad

[hannah]

Hi Brad,
I got the same error 1074396024    system memory error.even it worked well before. I use XP English version, Labview 7.1.
Can you help, please

[Brad]

When you say it was working, were you using the same camera in the same system? This error is usually due to the camera driver not being very DirectShow compatible. I would recommend trying a Logitech or Creative web cam (these cost about $30) since thse drivers are solid.

Hope that helps,

Brad

[hannah]

Yes, everything is the same. However, the device is an otoscope connectted by USB, then I have no other choice.
I have tried the updated ImaqDirectShow.dll but it still does not work. Do you have any sugguestion for me?
Thanks,
Hannah

[rolfk]

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@hannah wrote:
Yes, everything is the same. However, the device is an otoscope connectted by USB, then I have no other choice.
I have tried the updated ImaqDirectShow.dll but it still does not work. Do you have any sugguestion for me?
Thanks,
Hannah

---

Other than contacting the manufacturer of your camera to get a better driver that is more DirectShow compliant, there is really only the option to get a different model/make. Theoretically I'm sure some DirectShow acqusition is possible with that driver but expecting IMAQ for USB to work with incomplete or buggy drivers would be similar to expecting that your house will be reconstructed to work around faulty utility installation.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Boone301]

Yes,  thanks Brad a lot, but if you can tell us how to develop this DLL, Let us have this capability, we'll thanks for more.

Boone

[rolfk]

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@Boone301 wrote:

Yes,  thanks Brad a lot, but if you can tell us how to develop this DLL, Let us have this capability, we'll thanks for more.

Boone

---

For that information you need clearly to be with Microsoft, and here MSDN specifically would be your first starting point. NI is not and probably never will be into teaching this kind of thing. An alternative implementation for accessing USB Webcams would be IVision from www.hytekautomation.com which internally makes use of the Intel OpenCV Open Source library.

This OpenSource library also contains a DirectShow driver so here you could see how to access this API. However you should be aware that OpenCV is a fully C oriented API and in that sense not to LabVIEW friendly in targetting it directly with the LabVIEW Call Library Node. IVision contains a powerfull non-Open Source DLL wrapper for OpenCV that provides a nice and LabVIEW friendlier API to the LabVIEW VIs. This wrapper alone is worth the money you pay for IVision manyfold and the toolkit contains many image manipulation functions.

If you insist on writing your own DirectShow driver for LabVIEW then I wish you good luck, a lot of courage, and some serious amount of time to develop, debug and test this. Of course I assume you are a rather good C programmer too.

Rolf Kalbermatter

Message Edited by rolfk on 01-21-2008 07:39 AM

[nhmatlis]

Hello Brad,

      I have been directed to this thread by LabVIEW technical suppport.  I was told that you were the one who developed the USB drivers for IMAQ.  I've also been told that the driver was written in such a way that it is impossible to acquire simultaneously on two different cameras.  I have a (laser) application that would be well served to have simultaneous acquisition from 2 or more cameras.  If there is any way to make this happen we at the LOASIS lab at Lawrence Berkeley Lab would be indebted to you.  Thanks for your help.

Nicholas

[Brad]

If you want to acquire from multiple cameras simultaneously, I would strongly recommend getting a 1394/GigE camera and using our NI-IMAQdx driver, which is supported, and has much more functionality/reliablility, but it isn't free. We aren't planning on investing in the current USB driver, but hav considering adding USB support to our IMAQdx driver, but there is no planned timeframe for this, so I would recommend going with 1394 or GigE.

Another option would be the Luminera USB driver for LabVIEW, but this requires purchasing a Luminera USB camera. There are also other USB drivers available for LabVIEW, but I'm not sure if they support multiple acquisitions simultanously. Here are some links that may be helpful.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/274A74A901399D0486256F32007295F9?OpenDocument

http://www.lumenera.com/support/download.php

http://inventeering.com/CamViewIT/CamViewIT_VIs_and_Functions(preliminary).pdf