Multicasting
Prosilica’s GC and GE-Series gigabit Ethernet cameras support multicasting. When multicasting is enabled, the camera broadcasts image data to a multicast ethernet address. Any Ethernet device on the local network can receive a multicast broadcast so that several computers can receive image data from the same camera. This feature can be very useful as illustrated in these two examples:
- Distributed processing of image data - the image data can be distributed among several computers with each computer to relieve processing bottlenecks. An example of this might be a case where one computer is recording image data to disk, while another computer is analysing the image in order to make some machine vision decision.
- Distributed monitoring - the live image data can be viewed from various computers that are connected to the same network as the camera.
> instructions in PDF format <
How to enable multicasting with the Prosilica viewer:
1. Connect the camera to the network and start the viewer application.
2. Open the camera control window by selecting the wrench icon. (note a.)
3. Configure the camera to the maximum bandwidth and packet size supported by your network. Do
not begin streaming from the camera. (note b.)
4. QNX and Linux operating systems require an entry to the routing table, so that multicast packets
can be received. Run the following command (as root) on your system:
Route -n add -net 224.0.0.0 169.254.100.66 -netmask 240.0.0.0
*Replace 169.254.100.66, with the IP address of your GigE adapter.
5. Enable multicasting (note c.) and start streaming from the camera. Once streaming is initiated by the
master, additional application instances can monitor (note d.) image data.
Notes:
a. The viewer or application instance that first opens the camera becomes the master control application. The master retains control of camera parameters and attributes.
b. Multicast packet support for switch devices may be lower than rated for standard data transfer. Lower this value if you experience dropped packets.
c. MutlicastEnable = ON cannot be saved to camera memory and will need to reinitialized if the camera is power cycled.
d. The monitor application will be able to receive camera images and inquire about camera parameters. This application instance will NOT be able to change camera parameters.