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hi. i'm currently unable to connect to a camera, with both my own code and the provided sample code and visualtest.exe

visualtest.exe pops up a dialog with "Please connect a camera before running this application"; SimpleCameraList.exe does not succeed either.
the camera work fine with TrackingTools

my setup is:
- Windows7 (64bit)
- TrackingTools 2.3.2
- Camera: OptiTrack S250 M000994

i have installed the Camera SDK on my developer machine, which is _not_ the machine connected to the camera.

my development machine is:
- Windows7 (64bit)
- VisualStudio 2008 Professional Edition

when installing i simply ignored the warning about VS2005 service pack... not being installed.
after i upgraded the projects from vs2005 to vs2008 they compiled fine (well, CameraList/Release did not work before i removed glaux.lib and added cameralibrary.lib and searchpaths)
i then copied all the stuff to the deployment machine, added \lib\ to the PATH (so cameralibrary.dll is found) and started the programs: no luck.

so i started TrackingTools, the camera shows just fine.
if i run SimpleCameraList.exe while TrackingTools are showing the frames, the image disappears and the fan stops and the id-leds on the cam changes from ". 1" to " ."; once the SimpleCameraList releases the CameraManager, the image reappears in TrackingTools and the fan and leds come up again)

any hints what is going wrong?

just for completeness sake, the SimpleCameraList.exe displays:


Waiting for cameras to spin up...complete

Cameras:
None

OptiHubs:
None

return key to exit...


and the CameraSDK version i installed is: OptiTrack_Camera_SDK_1.1.1.Final.exe

hmm, it's getting weirder...
the Samples still don't find a camera.

however, my own code (if it doesn't crash) lists both attached cameras. hooray.

nevertheless, both CameraManager::X().GetCamera() and CameraManager::X().GetCamera(cameralist[0].UID()) return 0x0

i also tried to get a "virtual camera" (whatever that is) via CameraManager::CameraFactory(0), but that returned 0x0 as well.

With ethernet cameras, it is possible that the startup sequence and PoE negotiation can take a longer than expected amount of time. If the program is deciding during that period that the camera is not there, it can fail to detect ethernet cameras. I would recommend putting a statement at the beginning of your program that checks the camera count, and waits until it is either greater than 0 or 20 seconds has passed. This should allow time between the initialization of the camera manager and the continuation of the program for the cameras to properly negotiate their connection.

thanks for your reply.

however, it seems that this is not the case here:
my ethernet cameras are properly detected, at least CameraList enumerates them as expected.
the weird thing is, that even after i got a valid UID and serialnumber for the attached camera, CameraLibrary::CameraManager::X().GetCamera() returns a NULL-pointer.

also, the program i'm working on is fully interactive, so i can wait a deliberately long time between initialization and a call to CameraList (which works) or X().GetCamera() (which never succeeded yet)

hmm, so after i introduced a "Sleep(5000);" the samples finally work!

i still have a huge problem using the cameraSDK in my real-world application, but i will createanother issue for that.
thanks so far.