Industrial camera waste still beats any webcam!

[Sebastian Horlebein]

Hey guys!

As I have not found anything searching the group for firewire or 1394 I'd like to share this info with you.

Maybe you are not aware of this.

Firewire used to be a major interface standard for industrial machine vision. It became more or less obsolete over the last years,

State of the art equipment with GigE, CameraLink or USB3.0 is way to expensive for any hobbyist. That's why most or all of you use cheap USB webcams in their machines.

Every now and then Firewire cameras start to surface real cheap at ebay. There is more or less no professional market for Firewire stuff.

Every machine vision company I know has several of these cameras sitting in shelves gathering dust.

There is nothing bad with the cameras or image quality. We just don't use the interface anymore...

For example last month I scored this for 140 USD:

AV Guppy Pro F-503B, 2588x1940 1/2.5" monochrome CMOS, 13 fps (of course including all the fancy features industrial cameras offer like binning, i/o, triggers...)

Our vendor lists still lists this camera with 700 USD

Fujinon HF12.5SA-1/1.4 high resolution c-mount lens with adjustable aperture and focus in absolute flawless condition.

worth: 470 USD

Plus some fine drive mechanics which alone is worth way more than what I paid in total...

All that's left to do is to somehow get the camera API into my OpenPnP :)

[Cri S]

You probably need to recompile opencv with FireWire enabled and remove the nu.pattern calls from openpnp source. The last opencv version that include FireWire support from memory was 2.3.(2)