Implementation

Usage for the controller is unchanged from a stand-alone application. Open your camera interface with the default interface name (for example, cam0) configured in Measurement & Automation Explorer (MAX). Configure and start your acquisition.

For GigE Vision cameras, you can configure the camera to broadcast or multicast image data to all nodes on the network. Broadcast is not routable, and everyone on the same network sees the data, even if they are not listening. Multicast is routable if the network is configured properly. A multicast configuration is preferred if supported by the camera because only interested parties can see the data traffic.

Next, start the listener(s). On the listening computer, open your camera interface with the 64-bit unique identifier of the target camera, which you can find in the General tab in MAX. The controller can get a unique ID and send it to the listener sessions. Additionally, you must set the listener camera control mode parameter.

At this point, both the controller and listener systems are acquiring the same live data from the same camera. When running as a listener, most acquisition attributes are read-only. No camera feature or control is accessible when running as a listener system. Attempts to set these attributes result in the following error: Attribute not writable.

There is no synchronization between the controller and the listener host computers provided by the low-level driver. The user must start the controller before starting the listener. If the camera is not transmitting data when the listener initializes, the session returns the following error: No acquisition in progress. If the controller stops the video feed of the camera, the listener times out.