Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Mark Rivers" <[email protected]> · Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:41:48 -0600

Hi,

> We are trying to connect EPICS with a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 USB
> camera for evaluation purposes. We are able to get it to display 
> natively within Linux, but cannot seem to find any infomation about 
> EPICS drivers for this sort of device.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with connecting this device, another
USB
> camera, or any other USB device to EPICS?

I've been controlling a variety of CCD cameras from EPICS.  These
include cameras from Roper Scientific, the MAR-165, and Bruker cameras.
My approach has been to use a socket server (either from the
manufacturer or that I write) that controls or interacts with the
manufacturer's GUI control program.  EPICS is able to do things like set
the exposure time, start an exposure, wait for it to complete, save a
file, etc.  EPICS does not handle the image data itself.  The EPICS
software consists of a database (the same for all cameras) and an SNL
program (different for each type of camera) that communicates with the
socket server or directly with the manufacturers library.

Whether you can use this approach depends upon what the manufacturer
provides for controlling their software (e.g. library calls, socket
server, etc.).

If you are interested I can give you pointers to our code.

Mark Rivers

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System