firewire board+camera doesn't appear in max

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi all,

I am trying to use a Firewire board (Texas Instruments, OHCI compliant) plus an AVT Marlin 033B camera with Labview. Everything worked with the AVT software, which I subsequently uninstalled again. I am using LV8.0 and Vision Acquisition Software 8.2.1. From what I understand the Firewire board should show up in MAX, and it doesn't with or without camera attached.

I am using Windows 2000 SP4, and the drivers it uses for the board are: 1394bus.sys and ohci1394.sys. These are the generic windows drivers which (from what I understand) should work with Labview. I also tried the driver supplied by AVT (intek driver), with the same result. I also looked at the troubleshooting guide for IEEE 1394 cameras, and installed the hardware/drivers in the recommended order.

Does anyone have an idea of what is going wrong?

Thanks,
Ralf

[Ralf Gommers]

UPDATE: I found out from another user that the Marlin is supposed to use the nipalfw.sys driver. This driver is present on my computer in the WINNT/system32/drivers dir, but windows does not offer to use it and I can't manually install it because you need a .inf file first. I finally managed to get it to work by trying every file with 'imaq' in the name in the WINNT\inf dir. Hopefully this will help someone else to get it to work.

Cheers,
Ralf

[oliver.guennel]

Dear Ralf,

here is the perfect description: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/2977#toc5

Beside this, you need to make sure, that really the MS-card driver is installed and not the Intek any more.
You might use the "Install or remove 1394 driver" tool from the FirePackage directory or manually in the the device manager.

When the camera is appearing in the device manager as imaging device, it is ready to be integrated to MAX (see above).

best regards

Oliver (AVT)

[Ralf Gommers]

Dear Oliver,

Thanks for your reply. I did read that link, it is useful information in general but not really applicable to the problem I had. I did have the MS driver installed (I listed the actual files in my first post).

The problem was that there was no driver from Windows 2000 for the Marlin. I think it was supposed to use a 'Generic Digital Camera' driver, but it didn't. Therefore nothing showed up in MAX and I could not use MAX to switch to the imaqdx driver.

I don't know if this was a problem with the camera or my windows install, but the above description of manually loading an .inf file in the device manager solves it. Now it shows up in MAX and I can switch between the imaqdx and the legacy imaq1394 drivers.

Cheers,
Ralf