LabVIEW
Labview community and IMAQdx
Solved!
Is it correct that one can't use IMAQdx with Labview Community Edition?
I installed Vision Acquisition Software but my IMAQdx palette remains empty.
In the License Manager NI-IMAQdx displays status: Evaluation.
@Quiztus2 wrote:
Is it correct that one can't use IMAQdx with Labview Community Edition?
Technically that is not correct. You can use IMAQdx in the LabVIEW Community Edition but it is not free.
Practically you are of course right. Anybody installing the Community Edition does so of course because it is free. And they are very unlikely to pay for an add-on. Well they may if it only costs a few bucks but for that one would need a whole application store infrastructure like what you have on mobiles, and nobody is going to build that. There is not enough money in it to even remotely hope to recuperate the expenses.
I like the idea of the community edition in general. But if NI wants to increase the userbase it doesn't make sense to stop at providing USB image acquisition, since everyone has access at home to a webcam but hardly anyone has AD converters or so.
@Quiztus2 wrote:
I like the idea of the community edition in general. But if NI wants to increase the userbase it doesn't make sense to stop at providing USB image acquisition, since everyone has access at home to a webcam but hardly anyone has AD converters or so.
Yes, but image acquisition without also image analysis is very limited in its use. And most image analysis software out there is either extremely expensive (and I'm talking even more than what the LabVIEW Vision Development Module costs) or fairly cumbersome to use.
Besides there have been numerous efforts by people to provide alternatives, from good old Video for Windows libraries to ActiveX, and even .Net library interfaces, to their own house baked acquisition libraries. All of them have however ended up in the realms of software libraries that float around in some archives, and have long since been abandoned by the creator, either because the small or not so small donations they asked for using it, never ever came their way or if they made it available for free, they long since moved on and have no interest to spend any more time on it, or both.
Since Labview comes with signal processing many basic algorithms can be implemented by oneself with reasonable effort. This is what you would actually do when learning image processing anyways. At least from my perspective. Additionaly Labview is good in parallelizing which comes in handy with images. Furthermore one can still interface to e.g. opencv.
@Quiztus2 wrote:
Since Labview comes with signal processing many basic algorithms can be implemented by oneself with reasonable effort. This is what you would actually do when learning image processing anyways. At least from my perspective. Additionaly Labview is good in parallelizing which comes in handy with images. Furthermore one can still interface to e.g. opencv.
If you go the OpenCV road anyways, you can just as well use the OpenCV acquisition interface too! 😁
And yes interfacing to OpenCV is NOT trivial. You will have to write some C/C++ intermediate library in one way or the other to translate between the LabVIEW world and the OpenCV API. Much of OpenCV is nowadays C++ and can not be accessed through the Call Library Node.
Or you could go and use one of the .Net OpenCV wrappers. Experience with them has been however not great for me. It adds a significant runtime complication to the whole picture with the entire .Net voodoo as intermediate layer.
OpenCV and GigE dont't interface that nicely afaik. So the message is: Please don't dip your toes into Labview when experimenting with image processing?
@Quiztus2 wrote:
OpenCV and GigE dont't interface that nicely afaik. So the message is: Please don't dip your toes into Labview when experimenting with image processing?
You're inconsistent. 😁
First you bring up webcams as being available on all computers nowadays. And then OpenCV to use for image analysis. And OpenCV supports webcams. Then you suddenly bring up GigE.
GigE is not exactly your kitchen sink appliance hanging around in every home, and usually a fairly significant investment too. But to use this you still want to go the free beer road! 😁
