Impact Acquire SDK .NET
Typical Usage Scenarios And Example Applications

Interesting Topics To Start Integrating Impact Acquire

Since Impact Acquire SDK and the Balluff devices provide a huge variety of functionality, it will be helpful to use this page as a starting point which leads through a number of common image acquisition and configuration tasks.

The summarized code samples will show the most common cases and can be used as a base for an own image acquisition using the Impact Acquire SDK.

Note
Apart from those usage scenarios a large number of use cases can be found in the corresponding device manuals. Usually they are located at the 'Use Case'-chapter of each device's manual which is

Image Acquisition

Single Frame Acquisition

The most simple image acquisition task is acquiring just a single frame. Depending on the following task the complexity might increase.

The following samples will explain how single frame acquisitions will be realized in the most efficient way.

Capturing a single frame and store it as a file.

Using Multiple Devices At The Same Time

Single frame acquisitions will be possible by using not just only on device, it is possible by using multiple device which acquire a single frame each. Such purpose is explained by the next samples.

Continuous Image Saving During Live Acquisition

In some cases it is required to continuously save images from a device's live image acquisition instead of displaying them. This GUI program uses Windows Forms to achieve this functionality. In the program, users can set some acquisition-related and image-saving-related parameters, select a device and then start the acquisition. During the acquisition, the program continuously saves images to the hard drive till the required number of saved images is reached. Once the saving process has completed, statistics regarding the process (e.g. the number of actually saved images, error frames and lost frames) will be displayed in the info box.

Continuous Image Acquisition

A very common task is to acquire various images continuously to use them e.g. for video streams, continuous analysis or displaying purpose. This purpose is a bit more complex than acquiring just a single frame, but usually not that complex.

Note
It will be very useful to get familiar with the image capturing process of Impact Acquire to work create continuous image acquisitions. All important details are explained at the chapter The Capture Process.

The following samples will illustrate how simple continuous acquisitions can be realized.

Displaying Acquired Images And Capturing Data Into User Controlled Memory

In some cases simple continuous acquisitions are not sufficient since the image data should be processed or stored within the application. The complexity of such an application depends on the task.

Changing Device Settings

To modify device settings e.g. exposure time or gain, there are different approaches depending on interface layout supported by the used device. The two different interface layouts are 'GenICam' and 'Device Specific'. To get an idea which interface is supported by which device, please refer to the chapter Which Interface Is Supported By Which Device?.

Note
The differences between both interface layouts are explained at the page 'GenICam' vs. 'DeviceSpecific' Interface Layout.

Changing Device Settings For GenICam-Devices

Since most Balluff/MATRIX VISION devices support the GenICam™ interface layout, the following examples will be helpful. They will explain how device properties are changed in a convenient and safe way.

Changing Specific Device Settings For GenICam-Devices

Some specific settings offered by the GenICam™ interface might be necessary to be explained regarding their usage. The following samples will help to understand how the more special settings are used.

Changing Device Settings

For devices supporting the Device Specific interface layout (e.g. mvBlueFOX and Framegrabbers), the following samples will show possible approaches.

Special Device Functionalities

Beginning with the release of 2.49.0 of Impact Acquire firmware updates for all devices still active can be applied in a rather convenient way by using a high level firmware update API. This API is available for every supported programming language. For object orientated languages a FirmwareUpdater class will be part of the SDK and code snippets can be found in the corresponding documentation of the class.

  • ref FirmwareUpdate.cs

BVS CA-BN, mvBlueCOUGAR-X, mvBlueFOX3

mvBlockscan Mode

Beginning with release 2.35 of the GenICam™ device firmware a growing number of device models now support the mvBlockscan mode allowing to transmit multiple images as one thus using a single transfer block for transporting several consecutive frames from the same AOI reducing the overall overhead needed for transporting and reporting a frame thus in total reducing the CPU load on the host for certain scenarios.

The properties to control this feature are

The maximum number of frames that can be combined that way by the device might be limited for various reasons but depending on the use-case the performance benefit can be significant.

mvBlueFOX

PowerMode

mvBlueFOX2 USB devices allow to put themselves into a mode where less power is consumed. This can be used when no image acquisition is currently active and helps to reduce the overall power consumption of the system in idle mode.

The property mv.impact.acquire.SystemBlueFOX.powerMode can be used to configure this behaviour.

mvVirtualDevice

Apart from allowing to generate arbitrary test images in every pixel format supported by Impact Acquire the mvVirtualDevice package can also be used to capture images from a defined folder on the hard disk drive. This can be extremely useful when prototyping without real hardware or to feed defined test images into an algorithm in way the capture engine seems to provide these images. To do that just a couple of properties must be set appropriately:

The images are captured from the directory specified by the application in a Round-Robin fashion so once the last image from the folder has been captured the next image will be the first again. Whenever for some reason an image cannot be imported from the hard disk an artificial test image will be generated instead.

General SDK Functionalities

Callbacks

To get an idea how callbacks are implemented, the following sample will be helpful:

Setting Up The Framework For Third Party GenTL Producer Usage

How to set up the way Impact Acquire connects to and enumerates third party GenTL producers is described here: Setting Up The Framework For Third Party GenTL Producer Usage

All GUI-samples are delivered as part of the installation package and are installed during the installation process

Note
More details regarding efficient ways to create System.Drawing.Bitmap instances can be found at the Efficiently create System.Drawing.Bitmap instances chapter.

WinForms/Windows Forms