Webcam

[Graceg3]

Hi,

Does anyone know if there are webcams that come with labview programs?? Like a logitech webcam??

[Tim_S]

I don't know of any that have LabVIEW programs, however the USB IMAQ driver will connect to webcams. I tried connecting to a 10-year-old (Microsoft? Logitec?)) webcam a couple months ago and had things up and running with streaming video in a couple of hours.

[Minh Pham]

Using USB

Download and install NI-IMAQ for USB Cameras (preferred method)

Use a third party driver. Below are several popular sites from the discussion forums:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~parente/labview/index.shtml

http://www.hytekautomation.com/Products/IVision.html

Control and acquire data from the camera by calling the camera's .dll files.

Write your own drivers for the camera using VISA. There are several helpful resources. Some of which are:

Using NI-VISA 3.0 to Control Your USB Device

http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb3.htm

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Write your own drivers for the camera using VISA. There are several helpful resources. Some of which are:

Using NI-VISA 3.0 to Control Your USB Device

http://www.beyondlog...tshell/usb3.htm

For most cameras you can more or less forget that. First the protocol is not documented for most cameras. The actual USB control messages are only a few and you could get for some of the chips used quite a good idea about how to access them from looking at the Linux driver source for that cam. But some chips use proprietary compression schemes that are protected by very heavy NDAs. But even if the compression scheme is documented and available as algorithme, implementing it in LabVIEW is usually not a useful option.

[RalcoBe]

I connected a 30eur Logitech webcam to Labview, using some free drivers I found on these boards.

I made 3 things with it:

-Height check and control of a cam profile.

-Home alarm saving an image when the IR detector commands.

-3D scanner from a form on a rotating table.

Max speed was +-20Hz, far good enough for my experiments

Results were depending of the same as high-end 10K eur cameras for machine vision:

Everything depends of the light.

.