Difference between USB Camera SW and HW?

[igorjavaroni]

Hey guys, what is the difference between USB Camera SW and USB Camera HW? We don't know what is this!

[Greg McKaskle]

The names aren't that great, but we couldn't come up with better.

USB HW uses the camera imaging chip to compress the image to a JPEG. The amount of compression is not configurable.

USB SW requests raw images from the camera, then performs the compression on the roboRIO CPU. This takes more CPU resources, but is configurable.

So bottom line. HW gives you a low-overhead single option that will often work well. SW gives you more options, but will consume CPU on the roboRIO.

Greg McKaskle