Spinnaker Camera Error

[Jack Sullivan]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently a beginner with Labscript, and I'm trying to learn more about how to control cameras. Right now I am using a Grasshopper 3 camera from FLIR (originally bought from PointGrey), and using Spinnaker. I got everything working fine in SpinView, and the camera is recognized by BLACS. However, when I try to manually take a snapshot, I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\labscript-suite\labscript_env\lib\site-packages\labscript_devices\IMAQdxCamera\blacs_workers.py", line 323, in snap
    image = self.camera.snap()
  File "C:\Users\labscript-suite\labscript_env\lib\site-packages\labscript_devices\SpinnakerCamera\blacs_workers.py", line 148, in snap
    self.configure_acquisition(continuous=False, bufferCount=1)
  File "C:\Users\labscript-suite\labscript_env\lib\site-packages\labscript_devices\SpinnakerCamera\blacs_workers.py", line 201, in configure_acquisition
    self.set_stream_attribute('StreamBufferCountMode', 'Auto')
  File "C:\Users\labscript-suite\labscript_env\lib\site-packages\labscript_devices\SpinnakerCamera\blacs_workers.py", line 110, in set_stream_attribute
    self.set_attribute(name, value, stream_map=True)
  File "C:\Users\labscript-suite\labscript_env\lib\site-packages\labscript_devices\SpinnakerCamera\blacs_workers.py", line 130, in set_attribute
    PySpin.CValuePtr(node).FromString(value)
  File "C:\Users\labscript-suite\labscript_env\lib\site-packages\PySpin\PySpin.py", line 10467, in FromString
    return _PySpin.CValuePtr_FromString(self, ValueStr, Verify)
_PySpin.SpinnakerException: Spinnaker: GenICam::InvalidArgumentException= Feature 'StreamBufferCountMode' : cannot convert value 'Auto', the value is invalid. : InvalidArgumentException thrown in node 'StreamBufferCountMode' while calling 'StreamBufferCountMode.FromString()' (file 'Enumeration.cpp', line 132) [-2001]

I'm not sure why this is exactly and was wondering if anyone else has had a similar issue. I'm also still learning about how the triggers and parent devices work, but I was thinking that in manual mode none of that would really matter.

Thanks!

[Jack Sullivan]

I was actually able to fix this issue on my own. It seems that when taking a single snap, Labscript sets the StreamBufferCountMode to 'Auto'. However, this feature was depreciated by the SpinnakerSDK some time ago (https://www.flir.com/support-center/iis/machine-vision/knowledge-base/spinnaker-sdk-release-notes/). 

To fix this, I went into <path>\labscript_devices\SpinnakerCamera\blacs_workers.py, and then to the function 'configure_acquisition' on line 186. Within this function, in the else if statement, I removed the line:

 self.set_stream_attribute('StreamBufferCountMode', 'Auto')

and replaced it with the lines: 

self.set_stream_attribute('StreamBufferCountMode', 'Manual')
self.set_stream_attribute('StreamBufferCountManual', 3)

This turns the buffer mode to manual just like the continuous video version. I manually set the amount of buffers to 3, since on the SpinnakerSDK documention they mentioned that is the minimum number of buffers. After this, everything worked fine.

[Philip Starkey]

Hi Jack,

Glad you got it working! This sounds like a bug that should be fixed. Would you be interested in contributing a fix by opening a pull request on GitHub with the changes?

Cheers,

Phil