Labview driver for a SVS-Vistek camera with grablink card

[Olaf_Stetzer]

Hi all,

we have the following camera with a grablink expert II framegrabber card: SVS-Vistek-4021-12b-S.

Our application is the following: We want to use it in a microscpe application to monitor cloud droplets

in a continously sampled air flow. To minimze data storage needs we only want to store images with

some "content" so we need some direct access to the images before they are saved. Preferably with

a home-made labview program. Unfortunately there seems to be no labview driver available and the

software that is provided by SVS-Vistek is too unflexible for our needs. Are there any suggestions on how 

to solve this problem? We are able to pay for a custom solution using the dll's from SVS-Vistek as long as

we have the sources of the labview part of the software to be able to modify the software to our needs.

Thanks for your help,

Olaf

[Andrey_Dmitriev]

Hi, Olaf,

There are two possible ways in general:

1. As far as I can understand (but may be wrong), "Grablink" in Vistek interpretation - is just CameraLink interface. In this case you can choose appropriate grabber from National Instruments (PCI-1426, for example). Programming is not necessary, but you will need to create according *.icd file for your camera (in some cases you may get some troubles with this action).

2. Call Dlls from Vistek through Call Library Node. How complicated is this - depends from the complexity of the API. The most complicated things (usually) - is getting EndOfFrame event. Some third-party framegrabbers which I have programmed will call callback function for notification about EndOfFrame, and its may be "tricky" to get this event in LabVIEW (you need Wrapper DLL for transferring occurence). But impossible is nothing.

Let us know about API details if you will get troubles

with best regards,

Andrey.

[Olaf_Stetzer]

---

Andrey Dmitriev wrote:

Hi, Olaf,

There are two possible ways in general:

1. As far as I can understand (but may be wrong), "Grablink" in Vistek interpretation - is just CameraLink interface. In this case you can choose appropriate grabber from National Instruments (PCI-1426, for example). Programming is not necessary, but you will need to create according *.icd file for your camera (in some cases you may get some troubles with this action).

2. Call Dlls from Vistek through Call Library Node. How complicated is this - depends from the complexity of the API. The most complicated things (usually) - is getting EndOfFrame event. Some third-party framegrabbers which I have programmed will call callback function for notification about EndOfFrame, and its may be "tricky" to get this event in LabVIEW (you need Wrapper DLL for transferring occurence). But impossible is nothing.

Let us know about API details if you will get troubles

with best regards,

Andrey.

---

Hi Andrey,

thanks for your reply. As I now learned, the fragrabber comes with the euresys multicam driver, and there are even camera-specific setup files provided. The problem is, nobody here has any experience with programming framegrabbers. In general I am quite exerienced with labview but in other fields. Is there eample code available on how to access framegrabbers, or even specifically using the multicam dll? How much time do you expect it needs to get this working?

Thanks,

Olaf

[Olaf_Stetzer]

Hi Andrey,

we have made some progress with our project. We have now a vi that creates all required objects and configures them and at least gives no error messages. However, it seems not to record any images from the camera yet. We use now the multicam and eVision ActiveX controls provided with the camera. Maybe someone with experience in these controls can give us a hint what we did wrong or what is missing?

In future we want to process the image and then write it to disk so this functionality is not implemented yet. However, when we run the vi, the signal_handler vi is never called, so there must be something wrong somewhere else.

Cheers,

Olaf

[senthil_vedi]

Hi Olaf

i am also using the same card to acquire the required image. But i couldn't bring it successfully. Have you done it. If it so, please help me..i'm very much of need that.