Posts

Auxiliary Display with Matrox Solios & Millenium P650

/in /by

I ran into a problem while attempting to get an Auxiliary display to work on a Machine Vision system I was developing with a Matrox Solios Frame Grabber and a (dual head) Matrox Millenium P650 graphics card.  The plan was to have each vision station (in a Parmacutical AOI setup) output all of the images it acquired from its cameras to a massive 15 input digital video recorder (DVR) via its Auxiliary display port – in this way the client would have a record of all image acquired and processed on each of their 11 inspection stations   Anyway, while trying to initialise the display from code via a call to:

[code lang="cpp"] MdispAlloc(milSys, M_DEFAULT, "M_PAL", M_AUXILIARY,&milAuxDisplay); [/code]

Matrix Mil always reported that no system capable of supporting an Auxiliary display could be found – no matter how I changed the millions of possible settings, the auxiliary display would always fail to initialise – loads of hours later I became seriously worried that the Millenium P-Series graphics cards do not provide Auxiliary display support to Matrox Mil!

 

Mil Auxiliary Display Error

 

Well, it turns out that the P-Series graphics cards do provide Auxiliary display support to Mil, but in order to get it to work (in my case) an update needed to be applied to the Matrox graphics card driver – In my case I installed the update contained within m800du09.zip, once applied the Auxiliary display worked just fine!

 

So anyway the moral of this story is that if you’re trying to get an Auxiliary display to work with Mil and you’re getting this error message no matter what you do – get on to Matrox and ask if there are any updates for your graphics card drivers and install them straight away!

 

PS  As the Mil documentation says, in order to get the Auxiliary display to work you will first have to disable the ‘dual-head’ functionality of your Matrox graphics card.  Now, with the newer Matrox graphics software ‘dual-head support’ is no longer called ‘dual-head support’, instead go into the Matrox ‘Power Desktop’ settings, and set the ‘Multi-Display Setup’ option to ‘1 Display (no feature display)’.

 

PPS It seems that where the Auxiliary display is concerned, the Matrox drivers are not very good at cleaning up their resources when the calling process ends – it is very important that you call MdispFree() on the Aux. display when your process is shutting down otherwise when you try to re-launch the process you will get the above error message every time you try to allocate the display until you reboot your system!

Matrox Mil & Firewire 1394 Image Acquisition

/in /by

With newer versions of Matrox Mil (>= Mil 8 ) it is possible to grab images from firewire cameras without the need for any Matrox hardware, Mil will just use your PC’s normal Firewire/1394 adaptor(s) to acquire the images. When setup correctly you should be able to grab from either code or from intellicam.

 

However in typical Matrox fashion finding out how to set Mil up this way is quite difficult as there isn’t much information ‘out there’ or in the Mil documentation on how to do it,  and (again in typical Matrox fashion) the procedure is a tad non-intuitive.

 

So to add 1394 support – Install Mil, and when you get to the stage where it asks you which drivers it should install for the various possible frame grabber cards choose ‘Meteor II 1394’ remember though that you don’t  actually need a Meteor II frame grabber – Mil will use your existing Firewire adaptor(s) instead!

 

The next thing to note is that whenever you want to see or use any of the Mil 1394 features from Intellicam or from code you must have your camera(s) plugged in – otherwise Mil will deny all knlowedge!

 

For example if you start up Intellicam without your firewire camera plugged in then you may get an error message like the following, plugging the camera in and restarting Intellicam will fix things:

 

ooops camera is unplugged!
 

To grab images from Intellicam, first plug in your camera and then launch Intellicam and make sure the ‘Meteor-II /1394’ system is selected.

 

 Choose the 1394 System

 

With firewire Mil does not use DCF files like it does for other frame-grabber and camera combinations, instead the required camera and digitiser format is specified by a string.  To see the available formats hit the ‘New DCF’ toolbar button or choose the ‘File/New…’ menu option,  this will display a list of format strings:  

 

 

Choose your digitiser format

 

Once you select a suitable format you should be able to grab from the camera!