Halcon nieuws juni 2013

HALCON Dongle Support for 64-bit Linux and Mac OS X

With the upcoming HALCON 11.0.2 release USB dongles for native 64bit Linux and for Mac OS X will be supported. This means that USB dongles can be used with all HALCON 11 platform versions

Revised Halcon interfaces

  • HALCON 10/11 GenICamTL interface  (revision 4.11 / 5.6)
  • HALCON 10/11 GigEVision interface  (revision 4.13 / 5.4)
  • HALCON 10/11 SICK-3DCamera interface  (revision 4.13 / 5.6)

Release dates

  • HALCON 10.0.4 release: The final HALCON 10 maintenance release will be released until the end of June 2013.
  • The release of HALCON 11.0.2 is scheduled for August 2013 at the latest.

++ Support Corner ++ Where do GenICam / GigE Vision parameters come from?

More and more camera and framegrabber manufacturers are using standards like GigE Vision, GenICam GenTL or the upcoming USB3 Vision instead of proprietary SDKs. The customer can benefit from these by using generic interfaces which make it easy to switch between devices from different manufacturers and avoid the need to integrate different SDKs.

But how does HALCON know what parameters are supported by the devices? And, how does the user know that a specific parameter he might know can be used with the HALCON image acquisition interfaces?

GigE Vision and GenICam are generic standards. To allow the software to set different parameters the camera must report the available camera parameters to the host system. The software cannot know all parameters in advance as only a few parameters are actually mandatory and defined in the respective standard. Most parameters are optional and there are usually even some manufacturer specific parameters.

This report of parameters will be done with the GenAPI of GenICam where the camera sends an XML file to the software. This XMl file contains the information about the parameters. Now every compliant software can parse this XML file and knows what parameters are supported by the camera.

As you can see the question is not if HALCON supports a specific parameter but if the camera reports this parameter to the compliant software packages. When they are not reported, they are not available.

Therefore, when you or your customers are missing a certain feature of a camera which should be listed along the other parameters you might want to check the hardware manual of your camera. Maybe you need further settings so that the parameter will become available.

If you still can't see the desired parameters you can contact the camera manufacturer and ask if this parameter is available through GenICam or GigE Vision for compliant software. Of course the camera manufacturer should know best if the desired functionality is reported or not.