Linux support for Thorlabs DCx Camera

[fauxzor]

This is not strictly speaking an "issue" as it is pretty explicit in the documentation here that Linux support is not implemented yet, but in my mind I can interpret this as belonging here.

I have had great success controlling a Thorlabs DCx camera using Instrumental on a Windows machine, but now I have a need to make it work on a 64-bit Linux machine. Broadly speaking I've run into two kinds of issues:

• Figuring out the correct header & API to use
• Getting them to work with nicelib

I was able to find Linux drivers for the camera from Thorlabs at this link (under 'Drivers') which are identical to those provided by IDS for their uEye cameras (which Thorlabs rebranded to make the DCx series as I understand). By following the instructions here I was able to open the camera on the Linux machine in the uEye camera controller and mess around that way, so clearly the camera works with Linux, it just needs to play with Python.

However, it appears that pywin32 is needed for uc480.py to do its thing and this is about where my understanding starts to deteriorate. It doesn't look like pywin32 does all that much so it should be replaceable with something but I am not sure what the equivalent is for Linux (if there is one) or if that is even a source of trouble.

After pointing _build_uc480.py to the "correct" version of the Linux API & header (libueye_api64.so and ueye.h), nicelib also fails parsing any line beginning with IDSEXP in ueye.h, which appears to replace the USBCAMEXP syntax in uc480.h. I tried mix-and-matching them by pairing uc480.h with libueye_api64.so and nicelib did compile something, but the resulting _uc480lib.py file didn't work.

I would be glad to provide any error messages or additional info if necessary but I believe my problem is mostly conceptual. If it's possible to answer this without actually implementing it yourself, what would need to be done to control a uc480 camera in Linux?

[natezb]

Thanks for your patience, I've been a bit busy recently. I can take a closer look tomorrow, but here's what I remember off the top of my head. The APIs for Linux and Windows are mostly the same, but not exactly. Where they differ is primarily (or maybe entirely?) with the event handling. The Windows version uses the Windows event system (e.g. WaitForSingleObject()), and I don't remember what the Linux version uses. Look into the event-related section of the ThorLabs/IDS docs to find more info.

pywin32 was originally used to interface with this Windows event API, but that was before this driver got ported to use NiceLib. It should be possible to eliminate the pywin32 requirement for Windows, but it might take a little bit of work.

As for the NiceLib stuff, you might try posting the error traceback and I could give you a suggestion. There's probably something that needs to be stripped out of the header.

[bvieira13]

Hi, i try to control a Thorlabs DCx camera in Linux too. However, I don't understood how to make this.
Can tell if it was implemented for Linux OS?