[Greg McKaskle]

decibel.ni.com seems to be down, but there should soon be a tutorial up about integrating mpg support into the dashboard. I've attached the core VI and I'll explain how it is used.

This VI expects for the camera to be plugged into the switch and be accessible to the dashboard. The camera needs a team IP such as 10.te.am.11. When correct, you will be able to log into the camera from other te.am computers such as the dashboard, programming laptops, etc. You log into it by typing the IP address into the web browser, and the camera will ask for a login and will show test image and let you change settings.

You will also be able to use NI Vision Assistant to the camera without any cable or IP changes. Just type the camera IP into the field inside Vision Assistant. You don't even need code or a cRIO, just power to the camera and dlink.

Finally, the attached VI is a replacement for the Get Image From Controller VI in the default dashboard. This VI will initiate an MJPG stream with the camera, and process it just a bit differently than the Read JPG that apaird mentioned. The IP needs to the be the camera IP, not the cRIO. Also, if you change parameters to the session, you should reopen the connection.

I haven't used this enough to know exactly how this will interact with any jpg requests from the cRIO, but if this is used exclusively for dashboard updates, it has performance advantages in that it allows the camera to overlap acquisitions with other operations. I was able to use three camera at 640x480 at near 30fps. The limit was the old laptop's ability to decode the images.

Greg McKaskle