GigE camera SDKs / Cinderblocks (Blackfly, Allied Vision etc)

Has anyone worked with GigE vision cameras lately? Wondering if there are any stable cinderblocks out there?

I worked with @lucas’s cinder-vimba block a while back, but that’s nearly 4 years old and I remember having issues with it when I used it a while back.

I worked with Allied Vision (PvAPI for mac), but moved to Basler (pylon) a while ago. What cameras are you working with? All of them have their own SDK’s as far as I know. Also worked with the open source Aravis a while back for a cross platform solution, but in my experience it’s safer to stick to the proprietary SDK’s.

-Gabor

Hey @gabor_papp, sorry for the delayed reply. Working with BlackFly GigE cameras. It does come with the SDK, but was hoping to not have to write my own wrapper, figured this might be something people had worked with before. I feel like I remember @andrewfb mentioning they worked with some BlackFly cameras on an installation a little while back.

Most recently we worked with SVS-Vistek, and to good effect, though it’s yet another proprietary SDK. I imagine we could extricate that code if you’d like to use it. Longer term I’d personally love to see a community computer vision camera block that abstracts these APIs. There’s a bit of trickiness in that the licenses of the SDKs rarely allow distribution but a sort of “download and put SDK here” instruction / powershell script could solve that fairly well.

Ah, thanks for clarifying @andrewfb. I found a block created by the guys over at Red Paper Heart that wraps Black Fly’s spinnaker API, so I’ll clone that and see if I can bend it to my will. I’ll post any updates and/or progress on the forum.

@andrewfb I remember you mentioning when discussing that project that you used the SVS-Vistek cameras for, during a cinder meetup, that you used a paid face-tracking API/SDK, if I’m not mistaken… Would you be willing to share which one it was?

@Craigson Have you had any luck getting this to work?
For some reason all the blocks I found seem to break once a camera is detected.
would appreciate any tips

Hey @tamarziv, apologies for the delayed reply - I actually ended up using TouchDesigner for the image acquisition in the end, it was plug-and-play and I didn’t need to do anything fancy with the stream so writing a block seemed like it would be overkill. What cameras and/or platforms are you working with?

@Craigson thank you for the update, If I’ll make any progress on my end I’ll post again.