CMUcam2 GUI on a Mac

[petek]

I was playing around trying to see if the CMUcam2 GUI vi would run on LabView on a Mac and got it to connect to the camera, but it doesn't seem to do much more. Has anyone gotten this to work?

The CMUcam2 is connected via a KeySpan USB:serial adapter and I can send & receive using Screen from the Terminal. I used NI-VISA Configuration to configure the serial port and when I run CMUcam2 GUI, it displays the camera firmware version, but when I click Grab Frame, it starts downloading, the Download Progress bar completes and then starts over again. It does not display an image from the camera.

During the first download cycle the red LED on the CMUcam flashes, but after the Download Progress bar completes, the LED goes off and stays off. Also, clicking the Close button has no effect, except that the button turns black. Uploading camera config settings seems to work, or at least it displays a confirmation dialog.

Any suggestions for where to start looking for problems? I've tried changing baud rate with no effect. I'm using LabView 8.01 Student from last year's KOP on a Mac Tibook.

Yeah, I know - I could use a PC and it would work just fine, but where would be the fun in that? I wanted to beat my head against this wall just to see if I can make it work (the camera, that is - my head is way past working properly, obviously!).

[Danny Diaz]

I assume you've got all the patches for the software? The behavior you describe is eerily suspicious of some problems that Joe fixed in the code last year where the serial port was receiving incomplete packets but the code wasn't detecting it correctly. If you don't have all of the patches, I'd recommend checking out this post. If you do have all the patches, the Mac may have uncovered additional problems in the serial code that we have yet to debug/fix... Let me know which case is more likely and I'll see if Joe has some time to look into the problem.

-Danny

[petek]

That last update to the CMUcam2 demo.llb took care of the problem. The camera is talking nicely with my Mac now. Thanks, Danny!

Now, to see what makes this stuff tick - and see how quickly I can break it.