LabVIEW
Camera and Light
Solved!
Well, that's not really a LabVIEW questions. You need a way to control your camera and your ring light so we need to know how these are interfaced to the computer you are using. Do you have drivers? Do you want to control a relay for the ring light? What kind of hardware are you using?
Once the hardware connectivity is sorted out, programming will be trivial.
@sheetalp22 wrote:
Hello! The intensity of the ring light is controlled through a dial on the ring light. I was thinking about a way to turn the power of the ring light on and off through labview. Do you think this can be achieved? I was thinking connecting the light to the computer through an adaptor and controlling it be turned on and off through this way. Thank you for the help!
You just need a digital output and a relay module to control a 110V device. There are also plenty of wifi controlled smart plugs available for home automation, and if you know the API, you could just interact with them directly.
It depends a lot on what sort and quality of equipment you have. We usually use special power supplies meant for different sorts of ring lights. If you just want a fixed light intensity that can be a simply constant current power supply but if you want to regulate the LED intensity you need a good controllable current power supply. Changing the voltage for LEDs does almost nothing. To low of a voltage and they simply don't light up and as you increase the voltage they suddenly light up and with only minimal voltage increase get very bright and with a little more voltage increase they die very quickly unless they have their own current control built in, which makes them however a lot more expensive. And good adjustable current power supplies are however not very cheap either.
So assuming you have such a power supply there are two possibilities really. The power supply only has a dial that lets you regulate the intensity manually or it has an external control, usually a voltage input that you can use to control the intensity. Then you need an analog output signal that you can control from your computer. That means you need to have a DAQ card of some sorts. In very special cases your camera may come with an auxiliary connector that provides such an analog signal. Such cameras are however very specialist and even more expensive than anything we talked about so far. And controlling that auxiliary port from the computer is often very difficult to impossible without special camera vendor software. To do that from LabVIEW is almost never possible since the necessary control properties are very seldom documented by the camera manufacturer without a large volume OEM contract.
So what hardware do you have? How have you connected it to the computer? How far have you been able to get even some basic images into LabVIEW? Where are the VIs you programmed to do that? I ask for two reasons about these VIs. The first to see what you have done and the second to get an idea about your expertise of programming. It makes very little sense to talk about super advanced techniques and interfaces here when the code you have so far is nothing more than an existing LabVIEW example or looks even worse.
