NI MAX and LabVIEW Crash When Accessing AmScope MU Camera

Updated May 15, 2023

Reported In

Driver

  • NI-IMAQdx

Other

AmScope MU series USB Microscope Camera

Issue Details

I have an AmScope MU USB camera that I want to use with LabVIEW. The camera uses a DirectShow compatible driver and I can access the camera in the vendor's software. I can see it in NI MAX, but when I click on the camera NI MAX crashes. I see a similar crash when trying to access the camera in LabVIEW.

Solution

There is a known incompatibility between these cameras and the NI-IMAQdx driver. You cannot use IMAQdx to interface with these cameras even though they work fine in the vendor's software and other DirectShow image acquisition software such as AmCap.

Check with the camera vendor to see if they have a LabVIEW DLL or SDK that can be used to interface with the camera without using the IMAQdx driver. If you are able to acquire images using the vendor's DLL, then you may be able to convert the image to the IMAQ Image datatype using the IMAQ ArrayToImage VI so that you can still use NI's image processing functions.