I finally got the camera installed in my machine. At first I had it mounted with a lens height of 800mm above the work surface and no mater what I did with room lighting, focus lens, I couldn’t get a sharp overlay image. My test was a printed sheet of paper with bold type (dont know the font size but it was about 1/4" tall). If I lifted the paper closer to the lens it got better so I re-installed it closer to the work surface at 641mm. This is also closer to the middle of bed when lids open so win-win. The overlay is better now but still nothing that could be traced in LB. The images don’t look very different between webcam viewer and LB.
Q1. Is this normal for a 8MP camera?
Note, I did have to install the win7/camera drivers (google drive) posted here in forum in order to get it working.
Q2. Could this be a win7 issue, would upgrading to win10 be worth the hassle? This PC is only linked to the machine. I do design work on a win10 pc in my office.
Q3. Is it possible that I am not getting the full resolution?
I will get some pictures of my overlay for your scrutiny when I go back to the garage.
Q4. Would a “print screen” be enough or is there a way to “export” that I am not seeing?
Capturing 1/4" text from two feet away with a wide angle camera is not going to give you super sharp results. The camera is intended for easy work placement - it’s not meant to be a high-DPI scanner.
If you show the image from a screen capture of the webcam view, that should be plenty. If you go to Tools > Calibrate Camera Lens, then choose the camera, click next, and click ‘Capture’, it will tell you what the captured resolution is, and you can tell from that if it’s full res or not.
I looked up your order. You have a 140 degree. How large is your laser? The 140 isn’t particularly hard to focus - you just twist the lens - but at that height, the ideal laser size would be roughly 900x600 to be using the full captured image.
I have been so behind on things lately I haven’t had a chance to get back to playing with the camera but I am beginning to think my issue might be lighting. I do have 2 questions about the camera tho.
I placed a sheet of printer paper on the bed. With a Sharpie marker (fine tip) I hand drew 1" circles (traced a wood off-cut) and it was washed out 3/4 of the circle but changed with room lighting adjustments. I see in another post that I can turn Auto Brightness and Auto Exposure on/off if I select “custom camera system” in settings and restart LB. Unfortunately I cant seem to get those options to appear in my Camera Control window. Is this bc of Windows7 or is it the 8MP-110-W camera? Never mind, its windows 8 or greater only. Do you think it will help? if so I will upgrade windows
I run LB on 2 PCs. One in my office and one connected to the laser. I know this is a long shot, but… Is there a way for me to load a work piece (very organic shape) into the machine, capture the overlay image and get it onto the PC in my office to do the design work?
It’s Win7. The custom option only works for Win8 or higher, because it’s using newer tech in Windows. The auto-exposure has a hard time if you have a lot of black / dark area in the image and a small bit of bright white. If you were to put a couple other pieces of paper on the bed, it would likely help the camera choose better.
You can save the background capture, then load it on the other machine. I can’t guarantee the size would be correct after loading it, but you should be able to scale it to match the original easily enough.
I would try using another camera app on your system to see if you get those controls there, and try the “more paper” trick, and see if those help. Updating the OS is a decent chunk of work.
