How do I programmatically turn on/off the power supplied by a PoCL supported NI framegrabber?

[ArtN]

I'm developing a user interface vi for a camera that uses the Camera Link protocol. The camera is powered via the cable to the framegrabber (PCIe-1433). Since there is no power button on the camera, the user has to unplug the cable in order to turn off the camera, causing potential ESD hazards. Is there a way to turn off the PoCL feature so that the user can safely turn off the camera? The only workaround I could think of is closing the IMAQ camera interface and loading a new one that uses a different camera file, which is the same as the first but does not include the tag for supporting PoCL. Are there any more elegant or straightforward solutions available through NI-IMAQ vi's?

Thanks.

[BlueCheese]

Hi ArtN,

Unfortunately the mechanism used to enable/disable the PoCL feature is marked as being available only at initialization time of loading the camera file, which is why that is the only place that can enable/disable it.

The workaround you came up with is likely the most "elegant" I can come up with as well. It would be interesting to hear more about your use case of turning off the camera independently of the PC to see if there is additional functionality we should be providing to satisfy it. Additionally, I'm curious about the ESD concerns you have about removing the cable. We plug/unplug CameraLink cameras all the time and I can't say I've ever heard of a board or camera being damaged by that process.

Eric

[ArtN]

Hi Eric, thanks for your response. Turning off the PoCL feature would be handy to reset a camera that gets into an unknown state (eg by improper configuration of detector settings). Also, the computer connected to the camera is used even when the camera is not, so it would be nice to be able to turn the camera off without literally having the user 'unplug' it, especially if the camera cable is not conveniently located for the user. We haven't damaged anything here through ESD but our cable is getting a bit worn through all the unplugging. 

Art