[Greg McKaskle]

NI has more than one vision product, but only two that are shipped with FRC.

The two shipped with FRC are the Vision Analysis functions and Vision Assistant. I believe that you will find that Vision Assistant has support for USB cams, and should work with the ones you are asking about. This will allow you to view the camera image and grab individual images in order to inspect and build up simple algorithms inside Vision Assistant.

The part of IMAQ that provides the various camera protocols is the acquisition product. It supports many camera busses including USB. Ironically, it doesn't support IP cameras, so it isn't shipped with the FRC code as it wouldn't really help much. Instead we wrote simple IP drivers in LV and C on top of TCP.

Your options are to see about downloading a copy of the IMAQ acquisition or perhaps the Suite. You'll have a 30 day eval to fool around, and it should work with the USB camera, especially if Vision Assistant does. The other option is to use the Axis camera. The TCP driver will work on both desktop an the cRIO. One thing you may encounter is that various errors will come up when run on the desktop. This is because RT doesn't report unwired errors, but desktop does. The errors I was seeing are spurious, and caused by the web server on the camera occasionally returning errors about being busy. In the future, those errors will be hidden from the WPI layer.

You will likely see a significantly larger lag from a USB camera than the Axis. You'll also find that the setup and behavior of the camera to be quite different.

Greg McKaskle