Support for Additional Hardware

The Image Acquisition Toolbox™ software supports connections with hardware from many common vendors, but it might not support the hardware you use. To add support for your hardware, you can create an adaptor using the Image Acquisition Toolbox Adaptor Kit.

The Image Acquisition Toolbox Adaptor Kit is a C++ framework that you can use to implement an adaptor. An adaptor is a dynamic link library (DLL) that implements the connection between the Image Acquisition Toolbox engine and a device driver via the vendor's SDK API. When you use the Adaptor Kit framework, you can take advantage of many prepackaged toolbox features such as disk logging, multiple triggering modes, and a standardized interface to the image acquisition device.

After you create your adaptor DLL and register it with the toolbox using the imaqregister function, you can create a video input object to connect with a device through your adaptor. In this way, adaptors enable the dynamic loading of support for hardware without requiring recompilation and linking of the toolbox.

To build an adaptor requires familiarity with C++, knowledge of the application programming interface (API) provided by the manufacturer of your hardware, and familiarity with Image Acquisition Toolbox concepts, functionality, and terminology. To learn more about creating an adaptor, see Creating Custom Adaptors. For detailed information about the adaptor kit framework classes, see the Image Acquisition Toolbox Adaptor Kit Class Reference, which is available in

matlabroot\toolbox\imaq\imaqadaptors\kit\doc\adaptorkit.chm

where matlabroot represents your MATLAB^® installation directory.