Customizing a Python driver for IDS cameras under Raspberry Pi - Claudio Francese

IDS Cameras (www.ids-imaging.com) are widely used devices both in industrial and scientific applications for their high resolution, framerate and expansion capabilities. Other features include the synchronization of the image capture to an external trigger and turning on an external flash during the frame acquisition. The software and the drivers provided by the manufacturer are compatible with Windows ™, Linux for Intel™ architecture and some Linux based embedded systems. One of the supported platforms is the Raspberry Pi (www.raspberrypi.org). The Raspberry Pi embedded system is a small dimensions computer (85.6mm x 56mm x 21mm) running a Linux operating system on a 900 MHz quad core CPU. The presence of USB and Ethernet connections and an expansion connector (with SPI, I2C signals available) makes the device a good and low cost solution (less than 50 €) for setting up a scalable, reliable network of distributed intelligent controllers for electronic devices, digital integrated circuits (for example DDS signal generators, FPGAs, A/D and D/A converters) and measurement instrumentation. This document shows how to interface a USB IDS camera to a Raspberry Pi using the Python language and how to modify a working Python wrapper to the IDS camera C library in order to fit the user’s needs.