Friday, October 17, 2014

Point Grey cameras suck.

Spent way too many hours fighting with two different Flea3 cameras from Point Grey lately.  All the software is hidden behind a login page, and they'll spam you if you sign up.  Lots of different obscure and unhelpful error messages, and one of the cameras bricked when I tried a firmware upgrade.

It's not too much to ask for a machine vision camera that:
 - Works with linux
 - Has Open Source software that I can "apt-get install"

Suggestions for alternatives welcome.

5 comments:

Michael Jacoby said...

Hi there, I'm Mike Jacoby from Point Grey. I was curious to see if I googled "Point Grey cameras suck" if anything would come up and behold, your post! Yes I know this is 2 years old but I feel like garbage knowing your experience sucked. You've probably moved on to another product - I don't blame you! Hopefully all is going well with your vision projects. Just wanted to say I'm sorry you had a bad experience and if there is anything I can do please let me know (you're probably thinking "FIX YOUR DAMN CAMERAS!"). All the best.

Unknown said...

Glad to know you're paying attention. Any idea if the software is in better shape now?

Michael Jacoby said...

I would like to say yes! Maybe you want to give it another chance? Also, if you don't want to register to download the software I can send you a Dropbox link to download the latest FlyCapture Sdk. Thanks for replying.

Lunkwill said...

Thanks for the offer, but I'd just misplace it if I downloaded it now. The next time I need it, it'll probably be 3am on a weekend. Maybe you can pass along the request for open sourcing it; as a customer, I can tell you it really does make things a lot better for me, and makes everything better in the long run.

Michael Jacoby said...

I'll pass your comment over to the dev team. Best of luck in your future vision adventures!