Scorpion Vision Software supports the complete range of AVT Firewire cameras using the

• uniAVTGrab.dll - Scorpion Camera Interface driver

Setting the AVT Camera driver

• Activate the Service.Camera tab
• R-mouse click the Camera Settings menu
• Select Cameradriver
• Select the uniAVTGrab.dll

More information about Allied Vision Technologies  - http://www.alliedvisiontec.com/

System Requirements

The Scorpion Camera driver is developed based on the AVT FirePackage driver.

The table shows relationship between the uniAVTGrab.dll and FirePackage versions.

Information:

FirePackage 2.9 contains bugs and should not be used in any Scorpion Vision System.

Version 2.9.1 is a bug-fix release and can be used with all uniAVTGrab.dll from 1.0.0.5 to 1.0.0.8

Using different paired versions of FirePackage and uniAVTGrab may result in errors using camera.

FirePackage v3.0 / AVT Universal Package 2.1

This version is verified and used with Windows-7 Pro 64-bit.

FirePackage v2.11

This version is verified and used with Windows-7 Pro 32-bit.

• AVT FirePackage
• Release Notes
• UniControl.chm - UniTransform.chm

Recommended drivers:  AVTFirePackage_2_11.exe - UniAVTgrab.dll - 1.0.0.11

AVT property access

Supports standard named properties as "exposure", "shutter", "gain", supported properties depens of camera model.

Supports Firewire register access (supported from version 2.1.x.x), see example 2

AVT configuration files

Camera properties are stored in a xml file named as the <AVT model - serialno>.xml, where the content of the xml-file is bound to the camera model but not the serial number. Replacing a camera, the camera properties may be maintained by renaming the serialno part of the filename.

AVT Property Pages

Below are the AVT property pages explained

Format page

Supports both fixed format and variable formats - format 7.

Supported color codes with resulting image format

• Mono8 - 8 bit grayscale
• YUB411 - 24 bit RGB
• YUV422 - 24 bit RGB
• RGB - 24 bit RGB
• Mono16 - 24 bit RGB
• RGB16 - 24 bit RGB
• Raw16 - 24 bit RGB
• SMono16 - 8 bit grayscale image
• SRGB16 - 24 bit RGB
• Raw8 - 24 bit RGB
• Raw16 - 8 bit grayscale image
• MonoR - 8 bit grayscale image
• MonoG - 8 bit grayscale image
• MonoB - 8 bit grayscale image

Frame rate applies to fixed formats only, for format 7 the frame rate will depend of ROI setting. A smaller ROI will reduce busload and increase the frame rate.

Busload must be set to maximum busload for actual camera. When multiple cameras the total busload for all cameras must not exceed 1000 (100%) for each fire wire adapter, ie. using 3 cameras, a busload of 300 (30%) for each camera will balance the busload equally for each camera.

Note: The busload may need to be lower than indicated to avoid missing images.

The camera can be set up for single shot or continuous mode. Continuous streaming will reduce the acquisition time as the first arrived frame after grab command will be captured, but will increase the busload. Single shot mode reduces the busload but increases the acquisition time due to software trigger command.

Ctrl 1 page

This page lists all camera properties for actual camera.

All features may also be accessed by camera commands or by the Python Camera object.

Trig/IO page

See the camera for available trigger modes.

LUT page

A LUT file is a text simple text file containing n values in the range of 0 to 255 (8 bit). The number of elements in the LUT is given by the cameras internal pixel resolution (10..16 bits/pixel). Each pixel value will be mapped to a corresponding 8 bit pixel value in the LUT.

The first line of the text file may contain a comment starting with the has character #. The following lines in the file must contain the 8 bit mapping value only.

Example 1: LUT file of 1024 elements where camera pixel values are inverted:

#OSCAR: Inverting LUT
255
255
255
255
254
254
254
254
253
253
253
253
.
.
.
1
1
1
1
0
0
0
0

Example 2: accessing properties and registers using Scorpion python camera class

  def CamProps():
    cam=GetCamera('0')
    shutter=cam.getProperty('shutter')  #get shutter value
    print cam.getProperty('0xf0f0081c') #get shutter capabilities