continuous image acquisition and snapshot without vision

[MFrey]

I have a PCI-1411 card and LabView 6.1. My goal is to design a VI that continuously displays video and also have a button that I can press when I want to save the current frame to a .jpg file. I can perform each of these separately, but when I try to do them together, I timeout. I do not have Vision. Is there any way to do this without Vision or do I have to buy additional software? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I am relatively new to Labview, and extremely new to the vision world. Thanks so much!

[BruceAmmons]

I am guessing that you need to change the way you are acquiring the images. This should be quite easy without the Vision toolkit.

You should use Grab to acquire your images. Each time through the loop, grab the most recent image and display it. At the same time, check your "Save" button and save the image if it is pressed. The Grab should not timeout if you take a long time to process the image.

You will not be able to display full speed video easily without the toolkit, but that is another issue. I assume you are satisfied with the display rate you are getting now.

Bruce

[MFrey]

Hi Bruce,

Thank you for the quick response. I had fused two examples together. I was using the grab setup and acquire. Then, when the Snapshot button was pressed, I was doing an additional snap that I shouldn't have been doing, since I already had the current image out of the Grab Acquire function available.

Now I'm off to work out the minor details, but that was the major issue.... Thanks again! I have learned a lot today by reading your numerous responses. Thank you for being so prolific! It was wonderful to have so much help available.

Best regards,

Mary Frey

[LabViewStarter]

Hi!

I am using PCI 1411, too, and I was told to buy Vision to save images. I didn't do this yet, but unfortunately I do not get along with displaying images and saving them seems to be impossible, too. Do you have an example to show me how to do this. I'd be happy about any help.

Thanks
Starter

[BruceAmmons]

The Vision toolkit isn't necessary to display and save images, but it makes it a lot easier.

Take a look at the examples that come with IMAQ. There should be some that display images without using the Vision toolkit. I think they use the intensity plot instead. The picture control is probably better if you have a fixed image size to display.

You can also use the picture control routines to save the image. Just convert it to a 2D array and treat it like any bitmap.

Bruce

[Kyle_V]

Actually, the newest version of IMAQ, NI-IMAQ 2.6 comes with all the VIs for saving images to disk. It also lets you save AVI files to disk as well as display images at full frame rates on the LV front panel.

All you need to do is upgrade your NI-IMAQ and run an example program.

Good Luck!

Kyle V