How to use Basler camera

Basler makes industrial cameras. Setting up and using this camera with your own code is quite easy:

• Download the Pylon 4 camera software for Linux that matches the CPU architecture of your computer from here.

• Unzip the tar.gz file you downloaded.

• Install the software:

$ sudo tar -C /opt -xzf pylonSDK*.tar.gz

It was installed to /opt/pylon4 on my computer.

• Setup permissions for the cameras so that they can be detected by the Linux kernel:

$ sudo ./setup-usb.sh

• Screw the lens on to the camera body. Connect the camera using its USB 3.0 cable to a USB 3.0 port on your computer.

• To test whether the camera is working, try the Pylon Viewer application:

$ /opt/pylon4/bin/PylonViewerApp

You should be able to capture images from your camera using this app and also configure its various settings.

• Pylon 4 ships with a lot of sample code that shows how to use its cameras with your own code. Build these samples by setting the appropriate environment variables and try them out:

$ cd Samples
$ source /opt/pylon4/bin/pylon-setup-env.sh /opt/pylon4
$ make
$ cd Grab
$ ./Grab

The shell script to set environment variables did not work under the Fish shell, so I used a Bash shell for this purpose.

Tried with: Basler acA1600-20uc camera, Pylon 4 for Linux x86 64-bit and Ubuntu 14.04