WIA in labview

[D60]

Hi! 

Has anyone any experience WIA in labview? I don't find any topic about WIA LabVIEW! 😞

[Wire_Warrior]

This is an acronym I have not heard.  What is this WIA you speak of?

Jason

[D60]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms630368(v=VS.85).aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a332a77a-01b8-4de6-91c2-b7ea32537e29

Please, take a look at the posted links! 

I think this could be useful for us 🙂 

[Ray.R · Accepted solution]

There may be some devices that would provide dll's or API's that would be useful with LabVIEW.

If you use VIsual Basic which is provided for WIA support, then you can use .NET with LabVIEW.  There are .NET examples that ship with LabVIEW.

If you use scripts (provided by MS) for WIA support, you can call the scripts using LabVIEW.  Might be a little tricky depending on how many parameters you need to pass, but there are trick to do so. 

There might be some application (or API) for WIA which use ActiveX.  If so, then you would be able to develop code in LabVIEW.

There might be other tricks that I have not thought of or I am not aware of..  When there is a will, there's a way..  😉

[rolfk]

Actually the LabVIEW USB webcam support in the Vision Acquisition Software does use WIA to access the webcams. But it likely only accesses the subset necessary to support webcams, and does certainly not make the entire WIA interface available to LabVIEW. WIA is huge, complicated, tricky and usually very hard to make work in a generic way.

I have written an interface for our own use that does access the WIA passthrough interface to access the underlaying PTP driver to access PTP devices directly. It circumvents in this way the very big limitation in supported properties and events for PTP devices in WIA. It works but I did not manage to get any callback functionality working, which would be necessary to support asynchronous data transfer. The whole DCOM based WIA interface makes such operations completely unintuitive and almost undebuggable, since there are several marshalling interfaces involved, and while direct marshalling from the calling process to the called driver is fairly straightforward and mostly transparent, the opposite marshalling for callback functionality is anything but clear to me and as it seems almost anybody else.

That said WIA is an obsolete API, since it is based on DCOM/ActiveX and Microsoft has more or less disabandoned that.