Connecting to a device connected to another pc

[JohnG9]

Hi there, I have a wavefront sensor (a camera basically) connected to a pc (lets call it "pc1"). I am able to read from camera using labview on pc1. HOWEVER I wish to connect to the camera via another pc ("pc2") connected the same network as pc1. Is there a way to do this? if not is there a way to connect the camera (which has only a usb output) to the network so that I could read from it like so?

Thanks in advance.

p.s the wfs is from Thorlabs if that's relevant.. 

[wiebe@CARYA]

Pretty sure that is not possible. USB is a two way stream, so three devices using the same port will not work.

Only "solution" is to make a USB server application that communicates to the device that spreads its data over TCP\IP, UDP, or whatever.

[Photon_Dan · Accepted solution]

If communication with the wavefront sensor uses VISA drivers, it may be possible to make it available on the network using VISA Server. Some USB devices create a virtual serial port, and you can share that port by activating VISA Server in NI MAX.

If the wavefront sensor appears to the PC as a camera, I don't believe there is a similar option "built in", but you can make your own server app. Since you are able to read from the camera on pc1 you can write a server app that runs on pc1 and listens for client connections. You would then implement a set of command messages from the client to start acquisition, stop acquisition, etc. You can write images to a shared variable or implement you own TCP-based messaging protocol by flattening the image to a string and transferring that to the client.

[LV_Pro]

Have you looked into USB-Network adapters? A google shows a number of them from a number of locations. Not sure, depending on the speed of your device (USB, USB-2 USB-3), whether this would be fast enough. Another possibility is running a program on PC1 and using Network Shared Variables to read the data from PC2.

[wiebe@CARYA]

Does Visa Server allow both computers access to a device? From the quick glance at the documentation, it's made accessible from "another computer", not "other computers".

I guess it's not clear (to me) if you want the device to be available on several computers, or several computers at the same time.

[Minions]

How about connecting to the other PC(pc1) via Remote Desktop?  If the information gets saved to a shared network area, then the data can be reviewed off-line at a later point.

[RTSLVU]

Have you thought about just running LabVIEW on PC1 and using remote panels to interact with LabVIEW from PC2?