The Sony PS3 EYE camera is a popular choice for computer vision applications due to its low cost and high frame rate capability: up to 75 fps at 640×480 resolution and up to 187 fps at 320×240 resolution. We bought one to have a play with and it only cost us £4.15, including shipping to buy it from Amazon!
Recently, our placement student Petru started working on a project where he wanted to use the PS3 EYE but found that there was no out-of-the box LabVIEW example to go with it, so he decided to write one. (N.B. To get the camera working in Windows he used the Code Laboratories EYE platform driver, which costs $2.99. This driver seemed to be the most popular and he couldn’t find another reliable, free driver online.
What caught him at first was a timeout error, code -1074360293. This was because he didn’t check the default video mode that the camera starts in, which is video mode 413, corresponding to 640×480 resolution, RGB32 colour depth and 0.10fps. Yes, just 0.1 frames per second.
This fps corresponds to a new image being acquired every 10 seconds, which was too infrequent and produced a timeout error. Changing the video mode to a sensible frame rate, such as 60 fps, resolved the issues.
Although this VI was written with the PS3 EYE camera in mind, the program can be used as a starting point with other USB cameras too.
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Hi, i use the ps3 eye in the Ni vision adquisition, but i can’t use de snap option only de Grab option, and i alredy adjust de FPS…. can you help me…
Hi Kevin,
We have not tried taking still pictures with the camera, which I assume is what you are trying to do by using the IMAQdx Snap VI.
The Context Help of the IMAQdx Snap function mentions: “Configures, starts, acquires, and unconfigures a snap acquisition. Use a snap for low-speed or single-capture applications where ease of programming is essential. If you call this VI before calling the IMAQdx Open Camera VI, the IMAQdx Snap VI uses cam0 by default. If the image type does not match the video format of the camera, this VI changes the image type to a suitable format. ”
(You can access Context Help by pressing Ctrl-H and hovering over the Snap function on your block diagram.)
You might be getting an error because there is an IMAQdx Configure Grab called at step 6 in the VI, before you are calling the Snap function. Because, according to the help document cited above, Snap also configures the acquisition, it might result in an error trying to configure the acquisition twice in a row – first by the Configure Grab function and second, internally, by Snap. I do not have the PS3 camera with me to test this, but is is plausible.
Do you have a particular reason for wanting to use Snap? Reading the help files of both functions it seems that you can use the Grab function to do anything that the Snap function might do.