User`s guide

15 Adding Support for Additional Hardware
15-2
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.