Creating installer to deploy NI Vision app with IEEE1394 camera?

[sammamishmac]

I'm trying to find instructions for deploying an NI Vision application (not Vision Builder) with an IEEE-1394 (Firewire) camera. I am able to create an exe and I have the necessary licenses (NI Vision run-time and Vision Acquisition). I've MANUALLY installed the application and everything worked. The process was quite involved:

- Install the NI Vision run-time and activate it

- Install NI Vision Acquisition and activate

- Install firewire card and connect camera

- Allow Windows to find and identify hardware

- Run NI-MAX to get the system to find and recognize the camera, and to configure its settings

- Create the application executable and install it on the target computer

I found a KnowledgeBase article on deploying an NI vision application but no instructions on how to automatically install the camera drivers, activate licenses, etc. Can anyone help?

Thanks

Ps - I'm running LV8.5 and NI Vision 8.5.

[VGA_CD-ROM]

Hi Ron,
Unfortunately, it is not possible to automatically activate LabVIEW, NI Vision (Vision Development Module), or Vision Acquisition Software silently at this time, as described in KnowledgeBase 4BKIES0E: Can I Activate LabVIEW Silently?

If you create your an installer build specification for your project rather than just an EXE, you can specify to have NI-IMAQdx and the NI Vision Run Time Engine included and automatically installed on the system when your program is installed. However, as said above, you would still need to activate them afterwards manually and configure the system in Device Manager and MAX if necessary afterwards.

[aljuboori]

Hi,

Please, I have urgent question, I hope to assist me to solve this problem…

In Vision builder V. 3.5, I need to display the list menu in User Interface (UI) window inside vision builder, that this list menu display my available firewire (IEEE 1394) cameras and let us to select one of them…

 

Waiting your kind replay as soon as possible..

Thanks for your attention..

 

My best regards

Haider Al-Juboori

[Michelle_N]

Hi Haider,

I do not know if this is possible. Essentially you could use a Run LabVIEW step to populate a list of cameras connected to the PC but even after choosing one of those cameras I don't know how you would get that selection into the Acquire Image step. This step gets configured within the GUI that appears after adding it to your inspection. You then manually select the camera. How were you thinking of doing this?

You could always have the user double-click the Acquisition step and manually select the camera from the list. 

[aljuboori]

Hi Michelle,

thanks for your kind replay...

OK, please, can you tell me HOW...I can populate a list of cameras connected to the PC in LABVIEW?

Hiader

[Nate.H]

Dear Hiader,

This Knowledgebase and the Developer Zone example linked from it describe how to do what you ask:

Programmatically Finding Attached IEEE-1394 Cameras

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/AD1041C9B4B27240862570DD0068605B?OpenDocument

 Basically, you want to use the IMAQdx Enumerate Cameras VI to return a list of connected cameras. I agree with Michelle that I don't think it's possible to pass a user selected value from this list to the Acquire step in VBAI to select your camera. 

You MIGHT be able to set up different states in your inspection, one for each camera. Each state would have a different acquire step that was specifically setup for that camera. You would make a decision to transition to the appropriate state based on the user selected camera (all the user selection would have to be handled in the LabVIEW step, or from a Dialog box in VBAI). Note that there are many potential problems with this approach, and if I were completing a project with a user interface to select cameras, I would migrate my inspection to LabVIEW and complete my GUI (graphical user interface) there, where I had more flexibiltiy and control to do what I wanted.

Hope this helps,

~Nate