Hi all!
I decided to connect an external camera to my Spider gadgeteer. It has an USB port so connected it to the USB host module but
i am not sure what to do next, this is not a webcam, it’s the following:
Can someone help me getting started with it? how to capture an image ?
It appears that this camera has .net library, is there a way to use it somehow ?
Thanks
I think you have a huge, and probably insurmountable, mountain to climb here. I downloaded their camera manual from here : [url]http://en.ids-imaging.com/tl_files/downloads/uEye_SDK/manuals/uEye_Manual_EN.exe[/url]. It’s a hideous local HTML tree downloaded as a self-extracting zip, but it does contain some pretty detailed technical info. The link originally appeared on this page : [url]http://www.ids-imaging.com/go/edmund/[/url]
Beyond the fact that their minimum sustained data transfer rates are probably well below what the Spider can manage, there’s just not enough info there to build the low-level drivers that you will need. They provide Windows and Linux drivers and Twain, DirectX and custom SDK middleware, but no documentation on the USB traffic.
The amount of reverse-engineering and specialized tools you are going to need to crack this is daunting to say the least. If you are really bent on doing a project with this camera, it seems like getting an X86 Linux or Windows board is a better choice than spending a significant chunk of your life trying to get this camera to work in a way it was never designed or documented to do. And if you just need any camera - better to get a camera that is known to work with Spider.
Hate to be a wet blanket, but this just seems like a massive and likely impossible task.
EDIT: Downloaded the .net lib documentation too. It relies on P/Invoked calls to their SDK, that in turn lives on top of their drivers. In other words - more mountain.
@ mcalsyn - Oh, i thought it would be easier.
And that, in a nutshell, is the story of my life…
you could just pick up a webcam and be done with it - I am sure they will hold nothing to this one, but it’ll be at least only a small hill not MCalsyn’s dual or triple peak mountain range 
@ Brett - it’s much more sophisticated than that, this is a fluorescent camera.
One thing i wish to understand, for windows, they supplied a c# program to control the camera, can’t I adopt it?
Anyway, i requested the camera’s company’s support.
@ bioengproject - The C# program as @ mcalsyn mentioned uses PInvoke to call either the Windows DirectShow API or in some cases the camera vendors API for some camera specific functions. DirectShow requires video capture drivers for each vendor’s camera. In short this huge amount of software that NETMF simply does not have, grant it you wouldn’t need everything in DirectShow.
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The datasheet for the LPC187x only mentions, Full Speed USB transfer rate, so the camera vendor (IDS) may find this a show stopper limitation, again as @ mcalsyn mentioned in transfer minimums statement. All the cameras we have looked at for BioChem applications require high speed transfers rates on USB 2.0. We choose to use Windows, this allows us to test and evaluate different camera vendor’s claims in a timely fashion. Also you may have some minimum frame rate depending if your controlling some part of a process or just monitoring something like a culture.
Good luck with your project
@ PHITEK - Thanks for your reply!