Matrox frame grabber & LabVIEW

[Jian]

Hi all, I know the question is very old since I can find many messages
in discuss forum. But I just start to work with ActiveMIL and did
manage to make frame grabber card CronsPlus display image properly for
several times. It's not stable, I think.

First, I insert different ActiveX to control the frame grabber
sequentially: System control->Image control->Display
control->Digitizer control. In system control, image control, and
display control, I set automatic allocation and called grabcontinus in
Digitizer control. But the allocate and free resources puzzled me, so
did OwnerSystem. I don't know how to make it work robustly and
smoothly.

Did anybody have the same experience and successfully acquire image in
LabVIEW? I would appreciate your help or examples very much.

[Dr.Berns]

Hello,months back I have the problem of triggering an optical signal
into Matrox Meteor board II and I am not lucky as you are able to code
from the MIL so I resorted to finding a LabVIEW driver for it
(unfortunate that the supplier of the board has poor technical support
in application programs unlike NI) the IMAQ components I was informed
was originally coded by this people in the company called Alliance
Vision (France) they have all the Matrox Driver written in LabVIEW. I
am interested to see your code in MIL-C if you will permit please send
me the source code on my private email, ***@nip.upd.edu.ph I
work at a physics lab.

Berns

[Tony Rivera]

I also use ActiveMIL. I have found it better to turn off automatic
allocation to all controls and programatically allocate them. This has
the benefit of giving you greater control to troubleshoot and process
errors or resets of the video system. I use allocate methods to
allocate each control and the free methods to disallocate (free) them
when an error occurs or a reset is issued. My systems are completely
stable. I would recommend that you don’t use grabcontinuous.
Synchronize the video to your program by calling grabs as you need
them. I typically have a video processing vi that runs independent of
my test executor and all other vis and use notifiers to publish the
video data of interest. I typically grab images at 60 msec rate with a
40% CPU usage on a 1 GHz processor. This gives me every other frame
from the camera, fast enough for all my applications and leaves me 60%
CPU for other procesing.

[Jian]

You're absolutely right. I spend a little time to test the
Autoallocate property and draw the conclusion that it can't allocate
the resources properly. I use Isallocate property to check if the
resources have been allocated to avoid possible errors, and it works
well.

Post by Tony Rivera
I also use ActiveMIL. I have found it better to turn off automatic
allocation to all controls and programatically allocate them. This has
the benefit of giving you greater control to troubleshoot and process
errors or resets of the video system. I use allocate methods to
allocate each control and the free methods to disallocate (free) them
when an error occurs or a reset is issued. My systems are completely
stable. I would recommend that you don=92t use grabcontinuous.
Synchronize the video to your program by calling grabs as you need
them. I typically have a video processing vi that runs independent of
my test executor and all other vis and use notifiers to publish the
video data of interest. I typically grab images at 60 msec rate with a
40% CPU usage on a 1 GHz processor. This gives me every other frame
from the camera, fast enough for all my applications and leaves me 60%
CPU for other procesing.