NIDAQ Tools supports D/A, A/D and digitial I/O devices, not cameras.

Igor ships with some XOPs that can control cameras. Look in "Igor Pro Folder\More Extensions\Data Acquisition\Frame Grabbers".

There is most likely a better way to do this, but this might help. Use time() to get the current time. Compare this to the last minute value you took to see if it's changed.

string prevTime="", minute
 
do
minute= stringfromlist(1, time(), ":")
if (stringmatch(prevtime, minute)!=1)        //if minute value has changed
      ////frame grabber code
endif
 
prevTime = minute
while(1)

Although what I posted above would be an infinite loop, you can impose conditions to stop.

Sleep /S 1  // Sleep for one second

The cavaet here is that timing precision of the entire loop has to be tested to confirm it is within your bounds. Grabbing a frame and executing the loop statements take a finite time. So for example, suppose that while this statement sleeps for exactly 1 s, the overhead on other steps add 600 micro seconds until you return to this sleep again. By 1000 frames, you are 6 ms off step from capturing a frame at exactly 1 s increments.

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAHuntsville

Oh! Yes, that makes sense, either from the perspective of the variability in camera processing or the USB buffer transfer. Thanks for the info.

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAHuntsville