The trio of Labview, PT Gray Card and Basler A-610 F camera

[Asad_Tirmizi]

Hello all, 

I am trying to do a project on camera fusion with a PH d professor. As i am the research assistant i get to do the preliminary set ups. Anyways its very embarrassing that i am stuck on the very first step. That is simply detecting video from one single camera on LabVIEW. The hardware i am using is a " basler A-610f " firewire camera, a PT gray 1394b PCI Express Card (http://www.ptgrey.com/products/firepro/index.asp). 

The basler connects with the PT gray card through a firewire cable. Now as the card is not an NI product it is not being shown in the MAX. I just need to grab the video from LabVIEW, but i dont know where am i supposed to access the camera from.

I am using LabVIEW 8.2.1 and i have Vision Assistant and Vision and Motion tool kit installed in my machine. Moreover i just downloaded the Vision Development module's demo version as well. I repeat for clarification that i just need to acquire video from my camera.

[Asad_Tirmizi]

Anyone with any idea ?

[Asad_Tirmizi]

Any one ?

[Asad_Tirmizi · Accepted solution]

Finally ive solved it myself ! .. 😄 .. The main problem was with the fire wire itself !!! .. I was amazed when pt grey was charging me 75 $ for a firewire cable because it was available in my home country for 250 Rs in open market. I bought that one and then started five days of immense struggle and re struggle. Finally i thought ive tried every avenue why not give it one last try and buy the original cable. I borrowed it up from a firm and "khatttaaaaaaak" ... it works !.. though i had to install the basler SDK for viewing the video feed. Once the camera input was visible on the SDK. It was smooth running then onward. The IMAQ in MAX was able to detect the camera. The right software was all that was left to be installed. Once the right software was installed using MAX. it was all great. The camera feed was viewable on max aswell. I opened up the Vision Assistant and it started taking the camera feed aswell. 

I decided to port another camera in the PCI card, and hooked it to another quality firewire cable. The repeatition of above process made sure that both the camera feed was viewable on SDK, MAX and Vision Assistant. Though the allowed bandwidth at high frame rate continues to be a problem. Yet a problem which got me to bite the nails out of there socket is over and done.

Moral of the Story: Use original stuff 🙂