Artifacts in ImaqDx acquisition with Basler ace acA1300gc

[Amaury79]

I’ve run into a snag using the IMAQdx I wonder if anyone has seen this and knows how to get around it.

Attached you will see an image with some sort of periodic line artifact that is introduced when the camera is used by NI’s driver.

The images look fine if I use Balser's Pylon utility to to grab them. They also looked fine before I reinstalled the NI-Imaq driver (ni-imaq 3.4) to get LV2009 support.

After using the Imaq driver I have to kill power to the camera before it operates correctly again.

That is to say Pylon will also see the lines in the image after the camera is used with NI’s driver, until it is power cycled.

Not sure if it's related...but when it was working right (before imaq reinstall) there was only one entry for the camera in MAX.

Now there are two

0 Basler acA1300-30gc

1 Basler GenICam Source

Thanks,

Amauey

[iZACHdx]

 Hello,

Are you able to delete the other camera from MAX? Also, if you right click the camera that is showing up and select camera, what is listed there? What driver is associated with your camera in device manager?

-Zach

[BlueCheese · Accepted solution]

Zach,

You cannot delete IMAQdx cameras in MAX. They are added by plug&play in the driver. Additionally, only IEEE-1394 (FireWire) cameras actually appear in Device Manager because they are bus devices associated with the Microsoft 1394 driver.

Amauey,

The additional "Basler GenICam Source" camera you see now in MAX is caused by a combination of two factors. Basler's Pylon driver noe (optionally, I believe) installs a DirectShow filter that somehow lets you acquire using Pylon into a DirectShow application. Starting in Vision Acquisition 2009, IMAQdx added DirectShow support to allow acquiring from devices supporting DirectShow. The combination of these two items cause the Basler driver to show up as a camera in MAX. You can ignore this or uninstall this feature from Pylon.

The corruption you are seeing looks like packet loss. You can confirm this in MAX by going to the Ethernet tab on the camera configuration and seeing the lost packets indicator when it is acquiring. The lost packets look to be very regular. What kind of network interface are you using? It is possible that it might not meet the demands of GigE Vision. You could try reducing the packet size being used or changing IMAQdx's bandwidth control (under the Camera Attributes->Acquisition Attributes->Bandwidth) category to try to lessen the performance requirements. It is possible that the default settings that Pylon is using are different from IMAQdx's and that is why it works until IMAQdx changes those settings.

Eric