PointGrey Chameleon USB camera not working in Vision Assistant

[StFS]

Hello.

I have a Point Grey Research Chameleon USB camera that I'm trying to get working with NI's  Vision Assistant 8.6.

I have installed the latest driver for the camera and I've verified that it works with the software provided with it.

In addition, I downloaded and installed the latest version of the IMAQdx drivers from http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/id/1524/lang/en. 

What happens is this: when I start MAX I can see the camera under "Devices and Interfaces / NI_IMAQdx Devices". I can click on it and I can Snap images and Grab video from the camera without problems.

Running a LabVIEW VI that acquires images from it works (although there is a problem with the whitebalance being set completely wrong... the image is all yellow).

However, if I start the NI Vision Assistant (v8.6) and try to acquire images by clicking on "Acquire Image (USB)", I can see a list with the camera name but as soon as that list appears, a dialog box pops up with the message "The settings for this camera are not valid".

I should note that I have IMAQ for USB installed (http://sine.ni.com/devzone/cda/epd/p/id/5030) but I have tried to uninstall that to see if it is causing problems but I can't figure out how to do that exactly. It doesn't seem to appear in the Add/Remove Programs list.

The annoying thing is that this is just happening on one of our computer (just so happens that it's our "staging" environment so this is bad). Other computers do work and we don't know exactly what the difference is. Most likely it's the fact that those computers have a newer version of LabVIEW (we have 8.6.1 but they seem to have something called 2009... does that make sense?).

Anyways, we shure would appreciate any help you can give us. We're getting a little desperate here since this is a school project and we're on a rather tight schedule.

[BlueCheese]

Hi StFS,

I think the issue is due to the "Acquire Image (USB)" step in Vision Assistant being for the legacy (unsupported) IMAQ for USB driver rather than IMAQdx.

You instead want to be using the IMAQdx acquisition step. On older versions of Vision Assistant it may be labeled "Acquire Image (Firewire or GigE Vision)" but I think the labeling has been updated in newer versions. The step should still work for USB cameras as long as they are working fine in MAX.

Eric 

[StFS]

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BlueCheese wrote:

Hi StFS,

I think the issue is due to the "Acquire Image (USB)" step in Vision Assistant being for the legacy (unsupported) IMAQ for USB driver rather than IMAQdx.

You instead want to be using the IMAQdx acquisition step. On older versions of Vision Assistant it may be labeled "Acquire Image (Firewire or GigE Vision)" but I think the labeling has been updated in newer versions. The step should still work for USB cameras as long as they are working fine in MAX.

Eric 

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Well, I tried that as well but then I just got a dialog box saying that no devices were found.

[BlueCheese]

I'd guess your copy of Vision (which installs Vision Assistant) might be too old to support USB cameras under IMAQdx. You might need to get the 2009 version. I believe you should be able to use that with an older license as long as you aren't using algorithms that are only available under the newer versions.

Eric 

[GOC]

I've read two different message threads regarding the use of the Pt Grey Chameleon camera but there seems to be no conclusion to either thread.  Has anyone been able to make this camera work with LabVIEW 2009?

[BlueCheese]

Hi GOC,

Yes, I have used the Chameleon (model CMLN-13S2M) successfully. You simply need Vision Acquisition 2009 or higher and any version of LabVIEW that is supported by that version of Vision Acquisition (I believe it might be LabVIEW 8.2 minimum).

Unfortunately, the big question mark is currently Point Grey's drivers... They have had a bit of churn on their USB drivers recently and I have not had the best success with their DirectShow support recently. The two drivers they have available on the web at the moment are "FlyCapture 1.8 release 13" and "FlyCapture 2.0 release 15." With 1.8R13 I could open the camera and play with functions like exposure time in MAX but trying to acquire would return an error. With 2.0R15, their installer did not register their DirectShow components properly on my test system and I had to do this manually using one of their KB documents. After doing this, I could open their camera and acquire from it, but none of the attributes (like exposure time) show up for controlling in MAX. I'm told this feature has not yet been implemented in their 2.0 DirectShow drivers. I'd say try installing the 1.8R13 drivers and see if they work for you, as you probably want to control the camera and their older 1.8 drivers seemed to work better in the past for me.

Hope this helps,

Eric 

[GOC]

Hi BlueCheese,

Thank you.  Registering the direct show components manually did the trick.   This is the instructions that I snipped from the Pt Grey website that can be found at the following link.

 ********************************

To register DirectShow DLLs manually:

1. Open the Windows Command Prompt utility
2. Navigate to the bin folder in the FlyCap directory. The default installation path is
   C:\Program Files\Point Grey Research\PGR FlyCapture\bin
3. Execute the following commands:
   regsvr32 PGRDirectShowDecoder.ax
   regsvr32 PGRDirectShowSource.ax

************************************

http://www.ptgrey.com/support/kb/index.asp?a=4&q=310&ST=direct+show

In MAX, I do not have any camera attributes.  So, my next question is, did you build a camera file manually?  If so, do you have a copy of the file that you could attach?

[BlueCheese]

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GOC wrote: 

In MAX, I do not have any camera attributes.  So, my next question is, did you build a camera file manually?  If so, do you have a copy of the file that you could attach?

---

Hi GOC,

As I mentioned earlier, this is something Point Grey needs to fix in their drivers. They don't expose the needed interface in the 2.0 drivers for all the attributes to show up. In the meantime, you might be able to change settings with their software and save them as the camera defaults.

Eric

[santoshv]

sir,

     i have same problem with point grey camera and labview. the image turns yellowish when i run labview code. i did all that steps you mention to install direct show using cmd prompt. I tried with 2009 and 2010 version of labview. In one of the system with labview 2009 its working fine.

[Kristoff2]

santoshv,

You said one of your systems with LV 2009 is working.  Do you still have others that are not working?  What NI software do you have on each (please also include the software versions)?  NI-IMAQdx, LabVIEW, VDM, VBAI...?  Are you only having trouble with 'yellow' images or are you also having trouble with vision assistant like the previous poster?

Please provide as much information as possible so we can provide a fast solution for you.

Regards,

Sam K

Appilcations Engineer

National Instruments