LabVIEW compatible frame grabber

[PeterFoerster]

Hi,

a few weeks ago I ordered a PCI Grabber 4x4 from german company Phytec. When they hadn't yet convinced me to buy the thing they told me about how great the card works with LabVIEW and that there are many example VIs. When I tried to use the card in LabVIEW I failed so I contacted Phytec support.

The support e-Mails we interchanged was one for the gallery:

I told him my frame grabber doesn't work with LabVIEW.

He said, LabVIEW isn't supported.

I: But I've got some VIs that are supposed to work

He: Where did you get them?

I: There *link*

He: LabVIEW isn't supported anymore we erased all VIs on the server.

I'm sorry- my ranting is a bit beside the point.

Here's the point:

I am looking for a frame grabber card (PCI or PCIe) with which I can receive the signals from 4 analog cameras- connected via cinch- directly in LabVIEW. I don't care how this works, it just has to work in LV 2010. I do have a full professional license including NI Vision.

So far I have these cards:

Matrix Vision Sigma

They told me, they had a driver that works with LabVIEW 6.1. I told them that this could be a problem, but they didn't quite understand why. They said it would work fine, but I've heard that before. The good thing here is that it can put the videos together in split screen on the hardware. And I can send it back, if it doesn't work. But I can't imagine yet what that's gonna do to my deadline.

The imaging source

According to this thread the imaging source grabbers have worked with LabVIEW.

IDS Falcon

I didn't hear back from them yet.

What do you think of these? Have you had any experience with them or any other frame grabber that can process 4 cameras? Do you have other suggestions? What do the cameras have to support to work in LabVIEW?

Thanks for any suggestion. 

[PeterFoerster]

In addition to that I just got the answer from the imaging source support, which I'll try to translate as good as I can:

> How does the connection between the grabber and LV work?

There's 2 ways:

(1) IC LabVIEW Extension that can be downloaded at our site: It's a collection of VIs using activeX for simple setup.

Or
(2) IMAQdx DirectShow Driver: This is part of NI's IMAQ Toolkit. All our frame grabbers are compatible with DirectShow

> Are there any working VIs written in LV 2010?

Unfortunately we only get information about stuff that doesn't work. We never had any major support cases regarding LV 2010

[CSD · Accepted solution]

I've used several of the imaging source cards in LabVIEW, but using an ActiveX interface.  No problems.  I've got 12+ of the 4 channel PCIe cards you are looking at.  I've only had one with a bad channel.  I use fathsoft.com's videoCapX which has several options that IMAQdx doesn't have for recording AVI's directly from the device.

Good luck.

[PeterFoerster]

OK, that convinced me. I just bought the MC4/PCIe.

[markward]

(In case this helps anyone else) I've recently bought a DFG/MC4/PCIe , and found it's not compatible with NI-DAQmx 9.5.5 or any of the later versions I've tried, though 9.5.1 is ok. So as far as I can see that rules out doing data acquisition with LabVIEW 2012 with the card. Having the card in, its drivers installed and NI-DAQmx 9.5.5 gives a blue screen on booting. More notes at http://www.theimagingsourceforums.com/showthread.php?324745-LabVIEW-2012-2013-support-for-frame-grab...