IMAQdx Stop Aqusition in LabView is not responding

[somebody]

Hi,

I have a program in LabView to aqcuire images from a Basler piA1900-32gm camera. For each triplet of images the LabView program Starts Acquisiton, Aquires and Stops Acquisition. It has worked for 100 loops until now, when LabView's IMAQdx Stop Aqcuisition just runs but never stops?!? No error messages. I find it out by discovering that no more files are being saved to the hard drive. Sometimes I managed to get 200 images, sometimes only 30 before it "locks itself". 

I added "MaximumBandwidthAvaliable = 400" to the camera data-file, but it didn't solve the problem.

I have LabView 8.2 and Measurement & Automation. M&A also crashes when this problem occurs, and I have to restart the computer (a Sony Vaio).

Why have these problems started to occur? And what can I do to fix this?

//Charlotte

[BlueCheese]

Charlotte,

What version of IMAQdx are you using? Also, are you using an Intel-based network interface with the NI driver or are you using some other network interface with the generic driver? I'd like to get more information so I can try replicating it here. If you can send a simple VI that shows the issue as well that would be helpful.

Thanks,

Eric 

[somebody]

Hi Eric,

I'm using IMAQdx 3.0.1 and the GigE Vision camera is connected via a normal network cable directly to the computer. What do you mean by Intel-based network inteface?

I've attached the VI in which the troublesome Stop Aquision is.

Regards,

Charlotte

[BlueCheese]

Charlotte,

I'll try to see if we can duplicate this on our end with a similiar camera. In the meantime, would you be able to upgrade your IMAQdx version to 3.2 (part of Vision Acquisition 8.6 - available here: http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/1099/lang/en)? There have been lots of improvements since 3.0.1 that you would probably want anyways.

Thanks,
Eric 

[somebody]

Hi,

I've upgraded according to your recommendations and I could take 3x100 pictures two times, but then the samt problem occured and I had to reboot everything because the program gets completly blocked. Thi didn't help and now StopAquisition always blocks after some 50-100 pictures

Do you have any suggestions?

Regards,

Charlotte

[BlueCheese]

Hi Charlotte,

I tried replicating this with a piA2400-12gc here which I believe is fairly similiar. Both cameras make fairly high demands from the network throughput side of things. I was unable to replicate the hang you were seeing though. When you encounter this does the Abort button still work? If you wait a minute or two after abort does it ever recover? If you power cycle the camera while it is hung does it clear it?

Since the camera uses so much network bandwidth, it may be possible that you are losing packets. Depending on your network interface and how it is connected (PCI vs PCI-express) it is very easy to see bandwidth issues with a large/fast camera like yours. If you acquire from MAX and go to the Ethernet tab on the camera, do you see any packets being lost or resent after acquiring for several minutes?

Also, while this should be unrelated to your problem, you may want to consider using the Sequence interface for acquiring your images in a loop. Since you are capturing a smaller number of images that can fit into memory you'll get more consistent results than just trying Grab a couple images in succession (if your Grab and convert to array loop were to run too slow it could miss images where the Sequence would not). Also, you probably don't want to Open/Close the camera each iteration due to the extra overhead this entails.

-Eric