Device Selection¶
This tutorial illustrates the difference between the select and select_one_of methods in the DeviceManager class. select chooses the first discovered device of a specific kind, camera or storage device. You can also, optionally, select a specific device by passing the device name as a string to select. Whereas, select_one_of requires that you specify both the kind of device to select and a list of possible device names. select_one_of will iterate through the list and select the first device in the list of names that is discovered on your machine.
To start, instantiate Runtime and DeviceManager objects and subsequently print the discovered devices.
import acquire
# Instantiate a Runtime object
runtime = acquire.Runtime()
# Instantiate a DeviceManager object for the Runtime
manager = runtime.device_manager()
# List devices discovered by DeviceManager
for device in manager.devices():
print(device)
Output of the above code is below:
<DeviceIdentifier Camera "simulated: uniform random">
<DeviceIdentifier Camera "simulated: radial sin">
<DeviceIdentifier Camera "simulated: empty">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "raw">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "tiff">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "trash">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "tiff-json">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "Zarr">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrBlosc1ZstdByteShuffle">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrBlosc1Lz4ByteShuffle">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrV3">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrV3Blosc1ZstdByteShuffle">
<DeviceIdentifier Storage "ZarrV3Blosc1Lz4ByteShuffle">
All identified devices will be listed, and in the case of this tutorial, none of the vendor provided camera drivers were installed on the machine, so only simulated cameras were found. Note that discovered storage devices will also print.
The order of those printed devices matters. Below are two examples of how the select method works. In the first, without a specific device name provided, select will choose the first device of the specified kind in the list of discovered devices. In the second example, a specific device name is provided, so select will grab that device if it was discovered by Runtime.
# specify that the device should be a camera and not a storage device
kind = acquire.DeviceKind.Camera
# 1st example: select the first camera in the list of discovered devices
selected = manager.select(kind)
# 2nd example: select a specific camera
specific = manager.select(kind, "simulated: empty")
# print the 2 devices
print(selected)
print(specific)
The select_one_of method allows more flexibility since you provide a list of names of acceptable devices for it to iterate through until a discovered device is located.
# specify that the device should be a camera and not a storage device
kind = acquire.DeviceKind.Camera
selected = manager.select_one_of(kind, ["Hamamatsu_DCAMSDK4_v22126552",
"simulated: radial sin", "simulated: empty"])
# print which camera was selected
print(selected)
Runtime, so select_one_of iterates until it finds a device discovered by Runtime. In this case, the next item in the list is a simulated camera that was discovered by Runtime.