Hello everyone,
I’ve encountered an issue with using the Basler camera (Basler ace acA2040-180km NIR). For some reason I am not able to establish/maintain the serial connection to the camera using e.g. Pylon viewer. Other than that, the camera works fine and I can acquire data as usual, however I cannot change the parameters like exposure time or area of interest.
Used Hardware & Software
Hardware
- NI PCIe 1473R Camera Link Frame Grabber With FPGA Image Processing
- Basler acA2040-180kmNIR Camera Link camera with the CMOSIS CMV4000 CMOS
Software
- Pylon 5 Camera Software Suite for Windows (version 5.0.0)
- LabVIEW 2014 SP1
- LabVIEW 2015
Where it all started
The whole imaging system is connected to an isolation transformer as a safety precaution. During standard image acquisition, power went off in the lab thus shutting everything down. After the power came back online, I started the computer and wasn’t able to establish a serial communication to the camera anymore (using Pylon viewer from Basler).
Troubleshooting so far
- As we have another almost identical setup with the same frame grabber (NI PCIe 1473R) and camera, it was easy to switch my camera to the second system and confirm that I can establish a serial connection to the camera as usual and change parameters.
- I’ve also used the examples provided by LabVIEW (for example 1-tap 10-bit Camera with Frame Trigger) and the serial connection didn't work either which means that the LabVIEW code itself is not the problem.
- When I initialize the NI MAX and go to Tools -> NI Vision -> Select CLSerNAT systems, the camera is not showing up even after pressing the update button and only shows localhost
- The FPGA code includes the 2 Serial interface loops and Host VI has the SerialServer subvi with no alterations. When I run the host VI and open Pylon viewer, I can see that the serial connection does not stay connected and when you try to scan available cameras with Pylon Viewer, the serial connection only stays on for a short period of time (Connected boolean indicator in serialserver.vi flips green for a second or so). With the second system, upon opening the Pylon viewer, the serial server stays connected with the camera and you’re able to see the camera in the device tree in Pylon viewer and access the camera parameters.
When I use the Pylon CL Configurator, it detects the FlexRIO port but gives a message: “The stream is not a CLPort registry stream since it is missing the magic GUID in the first line”. And as an intermediate user I have no idea what the message is about.
Long story short
The serial communication between the PC and the camera is not working and for some reason Pylon viewer is not able to detect the camera. I’m so baffled myself why this is not working so if someone can shed light on this mystery I'd be grateful.
Best,
Kari Vienola