Can't connect Point Grey Chameleon 3 CS3 in SCap 3.2.6457

[Fossil Light]

Hi,
I just downloaded the latest version of Sharpcap 3.2.6457 particularly for the excellent sensor testing feature you have.

I managed to characterise all my ASI cameras (174MC, 174MM, 224MC, 462MC, 290MM and 120MM) although I did have difficulties with continuous dropped frames for the 224MC until I manually reduce the Turbo speed setting. What I can't connect to is my Point Grey Chameleon camera which does not show in the camera selction list. I can connect to it fine with the FlyCapture program and my 64 bit Firecapture program.

I am suspecting this is something to do with the drivers. Does Sharpcap need the 32 bit drivers rather than the 64bit which I have installed for Firecapture? Don't think you can have both drivers, 32bit and 64 bit, installed so might have to do the sensor measurement on a different computer and install the 32 bit and Sharpcap on their first.

The sensor measurement was really great but there should be a prompt about the bit depth and setting that to maximum before starting. It's hard to know what sliders/buttons you should manually set before starting a run and which you should leave alone.
Thanks
Martin

[admin]

Hi Martin,

I'd certainly try installing the 32 bit version of the PGR software (FlyCapture). I think that may help resolve the problem. For various reasons (largely that the cameras are no longer very popular), I have never added 64 bit support for PGR cameras. I suspect I should do that for 3.3.

With the analysis, it's actually useful to do both the 8 bit and 12/14/16 bit analysis - That gives SharpCap all the data it needs to give recommendations on when to switch between the modes.

There is not really much to worry about when starting the analysis - the analysis itself will take care of exposure/gain/brightness changes. Colour balance doesn't matter as it only measures the green pixels. I would keep 'Flip' and 'Mono Bin' off - I don't think they will cause problems, but I have never tried.

cheers,

Robin

[Fossil Light]

Hi Robin,
Thanks so much for your help with this. I installed the 32 bit drivers on a different machine as was able to see it in SharpCap and also do some sensor analysis so getting there.

I could connect to it in FlyCapture (which is installed automatically with the drivers) and go through all the modes (8, 12 and 16 bit mono and 8 bit and 16 bit RAW). It is a mono camera CM3-U3-31S4M-CS but SharpCap sees it as a colour camera and will only do sensor analysis in RAW8 and RAW16. If I select one of the mono modes it says 'Cannot Run Analysis. Colour cameras can only give accurate analysis in RAW modes'

That aside I did the analysis in 8RAW and it all seemed okay but in the 16RAW mode I get a really odd histogram as if it is the 8RAW stretched out (see attachment). Read noise values from the sensor analysis are negative. Maybe this is all linked with the fact that it doesn't see it as a mono camera.



Had lots of crashes after this and switching from RAW16 to RAW8 lost the camera and attempts to reconnect resulted in the PC completely locking up. Not too worried by this however as just using this PC for this measurement but want to fully characterise the camera's noise performance in 8 and 16 bit modes with and without external power connected to the camera.

Any idea why it sees it as a colour camera, Robin?

Cheers
Martin

[admin]

Hi,

So, the simple one first – the fact that you get the weird-looking picture in 16 bit mode is down to the byte order being reversed on this camera. For most brands of camera this is well defined and I can set SharpCap up to work automatically, but for some reason PGR have different settings for this four different models of camera and I've not yet worked out a way to tell which to use from the camera properties.

If you look in the controls on the right-hand side, you should see one called "Byte Swap 16 Bit Data" - change the value of this to the opposite of whatever it is at the moment and the 16-bit image should become normal.

For the other question, it seems likely that the camera is claiming that it supports RAW modes, which SharpCap interprets as a colour camera. If you look in the log after the camera has been opened you should find a line that contains something like:

PixelFormatBits: <NUMBER>, VendorPixelFormats: <NUMBER>

If you could find that line of information and post it here (maybe copy the whole log into Notepad then search...), it would let me know for sure.

cheers,

Robin

[Fossil Light]

Hi Robin,
Camera is a real pain in SharpCap causing multiple crashes when I try and switch from RAW8 to RAW16. Anyway after multiple restarts I could get it started in RAW16 mode but unfortunately I can't see the 'Byte Swap' command on the control panel in RAW 16. Atached in a screenshot in RAW16.

I checked the log after successfully going from RAW8 to RAW16 and got the following line that you requested.

Info: 12:24:31.9921671 Thread:#1 SharpCap.Cameras.PointGrey.CameraModeHelperBase+<GetPixelFormats>d__2.MoveNext() :: PixelFormatBits: 84740000, VendorPixelFormats: 0

Hope you can help,

Best wishes
Martin

[Fossil Light]

Hi Robin,
Made some progress. I found a setting in the Flycapture 32 bit program to control the camera under Advanced Camera Settings called Y16 Endianness with two settings:
-Big Endian (IDC 1394 DCAM Y16 mode)
-Little Endian (PGR specific Y16mode)
The latter was ticked.

Guessing that this was the Y16 byte order you mentioned I selected Big Endian instead of Little Endian and quit Flycapture (without going okay and bringing the Flycapture camera preview up which seemed to set the value back to Little Endian). After another crash the camera opened in SharpCap in RAW16. In sensor measurement the histogram went up to ~65k and looked a nice tight gaussian. I was then able to make all the measurements I wanted on the sensor in 16 bit mode (RAW16 with and without camera power to go with RAW8 with and without camera power).

On further investigation it seems that RAW allows different max fps than MONO and also disables gamma and sharpness- which stay at neutral values. In that case just having RAW8 and RAW16 is fine. I don't need to measure in MONO8/12/16.

As an aside, if anyone is using these FLIR/PGR cameras, I found a setting under Advanced Camera Settings to save all your camera values and also to reset all the values to the factory settings. These are under Memory Channels heading - use Save to save to channel 1 or 2 and Restore to restore to factory defaults. The factory defaults do not give the best settings for planetary work. It is best not to have exposure/sharpness/shutter/gain/frame rate to auto but set these to manual. Also when showing Absolute readings have brightness set to 0, gamma to 1.000 (neutral) and sharpness set to 1024 (neutral).

Thanks for your help,
Martin

[admin]

Hi Martin,

good to hear you are making some progress. The byte swap option is in SharpCap 3.3 beta (not in 3.2) - sorry, I forgot that little fact

cheers,

Robin

[Brian Allan]

I know this is two years later than the original thread BUT I'm having the same (or similar) problem with the latest version of SharpCap. I've installed both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. The 32 bit doesn't recognize there is a Chameleon camera attached. The 64 bit crashes if the camera is connected prior to starting SharpCap. SharpCap appears to be fairly stable with the Chameleon if the camera is attached after starting SharpCap.

[admin]

Hi,

the easiest place to attack this problem is the crash if the camera is already attached (crashes are much easier to understand than things just not working). Is it the sort of crash that lets you send a bug report (if it is, please send it). If you don't get the option of a bug report then you can try using a Microsoft utility called procdump to create a crash dump file when SharpCap exits. If that works and you can get the crash dump to me, I may be able to work out what is going on.

This post explains what to do (for a different problem, but the steps are the same) : viewtopic.php?p=5301#p5301

cheers,

Robin