usb camera free software

[paalbrok]

Hello,

How can I record videos in Labview with my usb camera? I would like to use some
free toolkit and driver for this.

Does it exist? I've tried some old IMAQ driver, but it doesn't work.

Do I have to use the expensive Vision Development Module to record videos?

Can the cheaper "NI Vision Acquisition Software" do the job?

I use Labview 2015.

[mikeporter]

What camera do you have? What software does the vendor provide?

Mike...

[paalbrok]

The camera is:

H264 HD 720P USB Camera Module USB2.0 OV9712 Color Sensor with Digital audio 3.6MM Lens

Model: ELP-USB100W04H-L36

We have used the AMCap software to capture videos with the camera. We want to use LabView instead.

Do you have any tips?

[mikeporter]

Again, what software does the vendor provide for customers who don't use their canned programs?

Mike...

[paalbrok]

Something called Dynamic webcam SDK.

[Tepig]

I know some vendor publish .NET API to access some camera in Windows.

LabVIEW can use .NET class and if the vendor does,

I believe that you can access the camera free.

Community: xiLIB - LabVIEW Interface for XIMEA Cameras (Supports 32/64Bit LabVIEW & 8/16Bit Images) - National Instruments
https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-29025

[mikeporter]

There you go. That SDK is what you need to find out about. As tepig points out this could involve .NET or perhaps ActiveX. Either one works well. The thing to be looking for is example code in some other language to show you the order in which to make calls.

Mike...

[paalbrok]

The toolkit in your link requires NI Vision Developement Module.

Dynamic Webcam SDK seems to have some activex controls and plugins, but not for LabView. I'm not very familiar with Visual Basic or other text based programming languages.

[Bob_Schor]

I think that if you want to simply acquire and view images (including saving them to disk), but do not need to process the images, the Vision Acquisition Software will do it for a wide varieity of cameras (you should be able to get a partial list by searching NI's Web site).  On the other hand, if you want to use LabVIEW to process the images, you probably need the Vision Development Module.  I'm sure you appreciate that there's considerably more effort to write good code that manipulates images -- if that's what you need to do, then getting NI to write the code and support it makes it anything but "expensive" ...

Bob Schor

[mikeporter]

You don't have to be very familiar with other languages, you just need to know enough about the syntax to be able to pick out the DLL calls -- which is actually a pretty low bar to get over.

Mike...