Balluff - BVS CA-SF Technical Documentation
|
To operate a GenICam based device apart from the physical hardware itself 2 pieces of software are needed:
mvGenTLConsumer.dll
and the mvGenTLProducer.cti
on Windows and the libmvGenTLConsumer.so
and the libmvGenTLProducer.so
on Linux when using Impact Acquire, but can be any other USB3 Vision / GigE Vision compliant driver package from a third party vendor) running of the host system (provides control over the device from an application running on the host system).The physical GenICam compliant device has a firmware programmed into the device's non-volatile memory, thus allowing the device to boot to a fully functional state without the need of any additional software running on the host. The firmware version that will be used when operating the device does NOT depend on the driver version that is used to communicate with the device. This will allow any piece of compliant third party software to operate the device without the need to have special knowledge about the firmware structure. This shall be illustrated by the following figure:
The name of the firmware update archive (* in the figure above) is:
Only during a firmware update the firmware file that has been selected from the file system of the host system will be downloaded permanently into the device's non-volatile memory.
So assume a device with a certain firmware version is connected to a host system.
During an explicit firmware update, the firmware file will be downloaded onto the device. In order to become active the device must be power-cycled:
This can either be done by unplugging the device and then by plugging it back in or (for devices supporting this feature) by resetting/rebooting the device by a certain software command (DeviceControl/DeviceReset). When using DeviceConfigure to update devices the latter mechanism will be used by the tool thus it is NOT necessary to unplug the device.
When the device has completed rebooting the new firmware version will become active:
Device/FirmwareVersion
or DeviceControl/DeviceFirmwareVersion
using the APIDeviceControl/mvDeviceFPGAVersion
Using ImpactControlCenter the same information is available as indicated by the following figure:
Apart from the device driver and firmware relationship there are certain places where a device configuration can be stored when dealing with GenICam compliant devices:
Both methods can be used to pre-configure a device. Using the first method, the state of the features will travel with the physical device, using the Impact Acquire settings, feature states can be copied from host to host as a file.