I just discovered the Coding4Fun portal (?) at Microsoft.
There is an article in the Hardware section on Image Acquisition using an old Logitech webcam using VB or C#. Pretty cool! There are other articles there, including some specfically on robotics.
Check it out:
Grabbing images into memory for playing with has sadly had little support for a novice programmer such as myself.
It is not such a big deal for a professional programmer who understands Windows programming, they just don't have any interest in wrapping it into a simple function for use by a novice.
I have used the Logitech SDK using VC++ but as a novice from way back never really got my head around OOP and was limited to inserting old fashioned code in a VC++ program shell.
At the moment I am using FreeBasic for which someone has provided an object to access webcams via Windows. The advantage of FreeBasic is you don't have to be an expert with years of programming practice. Unlike VC++ you can do neat stuff like high speed manipulation of pixels without the need for understanding DirectX etc yourself. Unlike the standard API stuff that came with the VC++ tutorials which ran slower than a BASIC interpreter!
JC
I agree. Give us some from the Mightey Casey !!!! :-D
I would hazard a guess that many, MANY, of the people that use Visual C++ do not
*really* understand Windows programming at all - they just think they do. There is a ton of initialization and other code - including the oh-so-fun "message pump" - that VC++ & its libraries takes care of for you - and you never even have to see it. (for the most part)Find some old examples from the original Petzold book to see what I am talking about. If you can get into that, you are well on your way to feeling more at ease in the Windows environment. ( Of course, they went and changed a lot things yet again with Vista. ) That Petzold book is old enough that you can probably find a decent used copy somewhere very cheap. You can program everything in it using a compiler as old as Visual C 1.2 (note that I did not say Visual C++).
That's exactly what the Visual environment is all about - having a good bit of the repetitive work done for you - and providing a shell to get you started. So, you weren't really "limited" in that respect. That's what myself and 1000s of other programmers do every time they use that Microsoft product. Underneath every single bit of the OOP stuff and MFC classes, etc., is plain old fashioned procedural code.
As an ancient old programmer that remembers what a KayPro "portable" PC looked like, it took me longer to use Visual C++ when it first came out than it did to write the same thing using much more extensive but familiar plain C code. Once I understood that the VC++ IDE had hidden a lot of things that I used to do manually, my productivity went way up.
It was the Logictech SDK that mandated use of the DirectX library, not VC++. It has its pros and cons. One pro is that that very same code you are talking about recognizes the built in camera on my new laptop, while some other very advanced visual software I have does not.
On the other hand, if you like FreeBasic then go for it! And write the rest of us some kick-butt visual processing software --- I'm not proud to use it! :-) I worked in QuickBasic a long time ago back where the languages were more distinct and it could do some wonder things!
Surely you are talking about running the VC++ stuff in debugging mode ?
Anyway, my comments were meant to educate rather than trying to preach one platform or language over another. Hey do what works for you and to heck with everyone else!
Good luck with everything and keep coming back to the group! JCD
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