switching between cameras

Technical NI LabVIEW
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Our team will be using two cameras. However, the first one is bagged with the robot, and the second one is not here yet, so we are coding as best we can for now.

Both cameras will be configured to send the video data directly through the bridge to the front panel per the directions from the National Instruments paper Send Axis Camera Signal Directly to Dashboard

One camera will utilize IP address 10.te.am.11 and the other will utilize IP address 10.te.am.12 (with te.am being our team number - as always).

My question has to do with how to mux between the two different video streams and displaying them onto the dashboard. We only need to see the camera output from one camera at a time, and we don’t want the classmate to process video data for both streams even though only one is being displayed (to minimize the processing requirements on the classmate).

Our plan is to have a case statement that will select the appropriate IP address to feed into the READ MJPG VI. Will doing that causes any issues? Will we be able to dynamically switch back and forth between cameras that way? If not, how should we do it?

Thanks for your help.

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Your IP setup and approach make sense to me.

My suggestion would be to start both cameras, and read from both streams in either the same loop or in parallel loops. This will keep the TCP buffers emptied. Skip the jpeg decode on one of them and see what the CPU usage is. The classmates are pretty capable, and I think you’ll find that you could probably decode and display both if you wanted. Please post your findings.

Greg McKaskle

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