Vision for Visual Basic application using 99% of resources

[bep]

Hi.

We have a VB application (App 1) that runs constantly, acquiring images (using the one-shot method) in sequence from multiple cameras. When an image is acquired, some processing is done on the image, then it moves on to acquire an image from the next camera, and so on.

Our problem is that we have another VB application (App 2) running constantly on the same machine that does not use any N.I. software. It monitors a serial port and provides some speech output. However, the speech output from this application is choppy when the other application described above (App 1) is running. When we stop App 1, the speech in App 2 works fine. App 1 uses up 99% of the resources, according to the Windows task manager
.

Is there some way to free up some resources from the application that uses Vision for Visual Basic (App 1) so that we can obtain better speech output from App 2? Note that response time is critical in both of these applications so we would not want to do anything to slow either of them down.

Thanks.

[gregstoll]

bep -

What version of NI-IMAQ are you using? I believe that prior to NI-IMAQ 3.0, acquiring images took up a lot of CPU time, but that has been fixed in NI-IMAQ 3.0.

Greg Stoll
IMAQ R & D
National Instruments

[bep]

Hi.

We are using NI-IMAQ version 2.6.

[bep]

... and the PCI-1409 board.

[gregstoll]

bep -

In that case, I would recommend upgrading to NI-IMAQ 3.0. This is the latest version of NI-IMAQ, and I believe the issue of taking up 99% of CPU time has been addressed. Let me know if your problem persists.

Greg Stoll
IMAQ R & D
National Instruments

[bep]

Hi.

I tried installing NI-IMAQ 3.0 on a machine that currently has NI-IMAQ 2.6, a PCI-1409 card, and the two applications in question.

My application that uses Vision for Visual Basic will now no longer display images from the cameras in the CWIMAQViewer windows. On any form when I try to view a camera image (either live video or one shot), I get Error -30000: Automation Error.

One thing that happened during the installation was I received the message "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\NI-IMAQ refers to a location that is unavailable". I replied OK to the message and the installation continued. This folder would have already been on the machine from the previous installation of NI-IMAQ 2.6. I don't know if this might be r
elated to the problem I'm having with not being able to view an image within my application.

Note that I can view images in Measurement and Automation. I did have to go in to each camera's settings and change to RS-170, though before I could view images. Prior to that I was getting the error "Cannot detect recognizable video source."

[bep]

I just tried uninstalling NI-IMAQ and installing version 3.0 again. This time I didn't get any errors during installation and I can view images fine in Measurement and Automation without making any changes to settings.

However, I still get the same errors from my Visual Basic application.

Is there something else I need to do besides installing version 3.0 of NI-IMAQ on the runtime machine?

Thanks.

[bep]

Note: we are using Windows XP.

[bep]

The other N.I. software we have, in case you require this information:

IMAQ Vision for Measurement Studio - Version 6.0
IMAQ Vision Builder - Version 6.0
IMAQ Vision Deployment Engine - Version 7.0

[bep]

Sorry for all of the comments, but I'm trying to provide enough info for you to possibly diagnose the problem. I installed NI-IMAQ 3.0 only on the runtime machine, not on the development machine since I wanted to just see if this new version would improve performance before installing it anywhere else. My VB executable on the runtime machine is the same one I used with NI-IMAQ 2.6 and was created on my development machine which has NI-IMAQ 2.6 installed.

Is this an issue? Should I be able to just install NI-IMAQ 3.0 on the runtime machine and use the same executable for my VB application?

Thanks.