Cannot log into NI1742 after it is set to automated inspection

Question

Hello
I have in my possession a NI1742 Smart Camera.  Once I set the camera to full automation, I
cannot log back into the camera through the Ethernet port. 
The steps I have done:
Go to the Target Tab
--> Target Options --> Startup --> Start Inspection when
launched
The only way I was able to disable the automated inspection is
by resetting the camera.  However this
deletes the uploaded program. 
I have the standard manual.  Is there another manual that I'm not reading?
Thanks

Answer 1

You cannot have a popup window work in a Run LV step when run on a target. The VI is actually run on the target, so you won't see the VI on your host machine. This is why the User Input step is not available for RT targets. I like your tab control to show the different states and achieve a popup like experience. One thing that could save some memory is to remove all the Calculator steps you have before each Update Custom UI step. It looks like you are trying to set the tab control in this step (i.e. setting a property node to a constant), but it doesn't actually do anything (except take up memory and processor time) because the Set Custom UI step is what will actually change the tab control value. So deleting all the unnecessary steps should free up some memory and run faster.
To help with the target not being responsive when running in inspection mode, you should put a delay any place where the inspection could loop repeatedly very quickly. It looks like you have delays in lots of places, and I'm not sure all of them are needed, but at least you give plenty of time for target to respond to outside connection requests.
Another idea instead of trying to implement a bunch of user interaction in the UI running on the target is to make a UI on your host machine and use the new VBAI API to control just inspection that runs on the target. This way the target doesn't need to handle all the login/password/user interaction that is probably more natural to handle in Windows VI or C app where you can have popup dialogs, and based on the UI interaction on the host side, you use the API to tell the target to run an iteration of the inspection and you can set shared global variables before hand so when the target does run, it can use values set from the host side in the inspection. I realize this is a big change from the inspection you have already, but I think it could have a lot of advantages:
- VBAI focuses on what it does best...automated visual inspection and leaves UI interaction/admin logging in control to a programming languages that is easier to accomplish this (i.e.LabVIEW).
- Makes your inspection smaller so it takes up less memory and you don't have to worry about running out of memory as easily.
- Makes it easy for your application to grow and include multiple smart cameras/targets all controlled with one UI.
- Makes you inspection a lot easier to read so not so much of the state diagram has to deal with user access/password types of interaction.
Some of the down sides include:
- reworking inspection to seperate UI interaction and username/password log in code from visual inspection
- need to synchronize updating variables from host to target with UI interaction/logging in...shared variables work pretty well, but they are not meant to be deterministic or synchronous (i.e. no gaurntee that a variable you set first will be updated first on target, so even though you set params before you set a flag to start inspection, the start inspection flag may be updated on the target before the params are). There is a Flush Shared Variable VI that can help avoid this problem though, but just wanted to make sure you knew this was something to look out for and handle by using the Flush Variable VI.
Anyway, something to think about. Thanks for including your inspection, very helpful to see how you're using VBAI.
Thanks,
Brad