Bill, I have used IMAQ-Vision up until Version 4.1 along with a PCI-IMAQ-1408 board on the Apple Macintosh where IMAQ Vision was first available before the Windoze release. Anyway I still use this hardware with a monochrome video camera and I still use the IMAQ-Vision toolbox for image analysis functions to track objects etc. The IMAQ library functions are very important and useful tools after capturing images with the camera and the help of the IMAQ board. Unfortunately NI dropped support for IMAQ Vision for the Mac platform a few years ago and for this I am now stuck with LabVIEW 6.1 in the Classic MacOS environment because most of the IMAQ-Vision VIs broke under LabVIEW7.
I have done things with Chris Salzmanns Quicktime drivers for Firewire or USB cameras too. These drivers can easily get the images from a consumer product type digital camera into LabVIEW. The images will be a color bitmaps which may for example be displayed in a picture control. However whenever I have to do calculations on the image data I tend to revert to the good old PCI-1408 image acquisition and analysis � la IMAQ-Vision. Chris Salzmann's latest release of his Quicktime Firewire drivers also run under Windoze. You may get in touch with him to ask in what form he releases these driver VIs he created. For this see the page: http://labview.epfl.ch/VIs.html If you are interested in the ways we are using LabVIEW in physics education at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern you may download a white paper about such type of applications which I wrote a while back. It is found under: http://www.clab.unibe.ch/labview/whitepaper/LV-PhysicsWPScreen.pdf I hope this will at least give you some ideas to start out. Regards Urs >I've been asked to help in an existing project to use firewire video >cams in the student labs, where the idea is to capture streaming video >of bouncing balls etc.,then allow the students to make position >measurements etc, onscreen in a post-processing application. > >If anyone out there is already doing this and has time to share some >pointers as to what drivers, cams, etc. has worked for you, we would >really appreciate it. > >I'm pretty sure I've seen some discussion of this scroll by in the past >when I wasn't paying attention to this topic. > >Carnegie Mellon Univ has a set of C++ 1394 drivers availiable, anybody >using those with dll calls from Labview for camera control? > >Thanks, > >--BG > >Bill Gilbert, EM Tech >UMN School of Physics and Astronomy >Tel 612 624 4870 >Fax 612 624 4578
