LabVIEW VIs for Mikrotron MC 1302 ?

[josborne]

A while ago, we were playing with the MC 1302 CameraLink camera from Mikrotron.  We liked it, but had some trouble integrating it with the LabVIEW IMAQ software. 

It looked like we had to use a special vendor-supplied utility to conifgure the camera.  But we need a way to use LabVIEW and IMAQ to programmatically configure many of these settings (i.e. frame rate, ROI).

Has anyone out there been succussful at integrating one of these cameras with LabVIEW and IMAQ? 
Are there publicly available VIs for configuring the camera?

Thanks!

[jslouie]

Hi John,


Thank you for contacting National Instruments.  I have a few questions for you.  Are you using one of National Instrument's frame grabbers?  Possibly the PCI-1426 or PCIe-1429?

If you are using one of our frame grabbers, have you tried using the camera file located here?

http://sine.ni.com/apps/utf8/nipc.product?pid=7282

Let me know, thanks!

Justin Louie

[josborne]

Hi Justin,

At the moment, we do not have any hardware.  We are still in the "design phase" and are considering different hardware solutions that can solve our needs.  However, our plan is to use this MC1302 camera with the NI PCI-1426 frame grabber.  We would then use the camera file you mentioned. 

This camera file would allow us to acquire images using LabVIEW and IMAQ.  But how do we programmatically configure things like frame rate and ROI?  To configure these settings, I believe I would need to:

• Use the vendor supplied configuration utility located at the link above.  This is not an option because we need to do configure these settings programmatically in LabVIEW.
  

Or:

• Writing my own VIs that communicate with the Camera Link DLL.  We could do this, but it would require a lot of time.  I am wondering if there are there any existing VIs for configuring these settings?
  

[josborne]

I did a bit more research and discovered that I can probably used the "IMAQ Serial Write.vi" to write strings to the camera to programmatically configure it.

But how do I know what strings to write?  I guess I need to contact the manufacturer?  Or is there some kind of standard API for this?

Anyway, my question still stands:  "Does anyone have any VIs out there that do this?" . No need for me to re-invent the whell if I don't have to.

[129810919082]

Hi John,

Any luck with this? I know this thread is quite old now, but do you seem to remember which method worked for controlling this camera?

Thanks