Support for USB cameras in VBAI?

Question

NI have a free driver that allows Vision 7.1 to access USB 2 cameras. Is there anything similar available for VBAI that would allow me to use an industrial USB 2.0 camera?

Answer 1

The free NI-IMAQ for USB Cameras driver is meant to support simple USB webcams that use DirectShow.  For machine vision or scientific imaging applications, most USB cameras don't have the performance or the features needed, like triggering.  The primary "customer" for the free driver has been universities that use webcams in labs.
With that said, there are a few industrial USB cameras out there that can be used for machine vision.  The problem is tha there is no industrial USB camera standard that covers them all (like there is with FireWire), so companies like National Instruments would have to provide and support different drivers and software tools for every indutrial USB camera. 
A better solution is IEEE 1394 (or FireWire).  They offer the same performance as USB 2.0 cameras and are around the same price.  On top of that, almost every large industrial camera manufacture has a line of industrial FireWire cameras (including Sony, Basler, FLIR, and Cohu), and they all conform to the same DCAM (or IIDC) standard.  WIth this standard, our one driver, NI-IMAQ for IEEE 1394 Cameras, works with all of them.
Vision Builder AI is designed to solve machine vision applications without programming, while USB cameras usually don't provide the triggering or advanced modes necessary for machine vision.  Because machine vision and USB cameras don't usually go together, we didn't provide support for USB cameras within Vision Builder AI.  My question to you, another_novice, is why would you like to use a USB camera with Vision Builder AI?  Are there particular features in a certain USB camera that you can't find in other cameras?  I would really like to know so we can get a better picture of how our customers are using our products.
Thank you.
KyleV.