Using the Canon Digital Camera with Asure ID

Oak Tree Data, Inc. Tech Note #7 Using the Canon Digital Camera with Asure ID Provided as a service to our customers from Oak Tree Data, Inc. Prepa...
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Oak Tree Data, Inc.

Tech Note #7

Using the Canon Digital Camera with Asure ID

Provided as a service to our customers from Oak Tree Data, Inc. Prepared May, 2005 by Charles Baker, OTD Technical Support

Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ 2 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3 A Note about Permissions:....................................................................................... 3 Setup and Installation .................................................................................................. 4 A Note about Batteries: ............................................................................................ 4 Capture from Memory.................................................................................................. 5 Live Capture ................................................................................................................ 6

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Introduction The Canon A510 Digital Camera and Asure ID are as good a match as any on the market right now. The Canon offers the flexibility of using as a traditional video capture device for ID badging as well as the portability of a small form-factor 3.2 mega-pixel camera. However, the use of the camera within Asure ID is not as intuitive as using something like the Logitech QuickCam. With that video capture camera all you do is double-click on the photo capture block in the software and the image comes in. There are a couple of additional steps to take with the Canon, but they are few and easy to become accustomed to.

A Note about Permissions: Installing software on any Windows NT kernel PC (Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP) usually requires that you have what is called administrator privileges. User accounts on these machines are granted rights to do certain things, and are grouped according to how many rights are granted. The administrator group is allowed full access to all files and folders, and can install and remove software with no restriction. In managed environments, users are often restricted in their rights on computers. If this is the case, please contact your IT department before attempting to install or modify any software to your workstation.

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Setup and Installation In order to use the camera with Asure ID, the camera software must be installed on the PC first. Follow the instructions included with the camera to do this. Simply choosing the defaults for installation will be enough to install the software for use by Asure ID. Remember! The camera will be seen by the PC as an USB device. As with all USB devices, install the software BEFORE you plug the camera into the USB port. This is the reverse of traditional device installation on the PC, but is the norm for installing devices that use the USB bus.

Before starting Asure ID, insure the camera is plugged into the USB port, that the take picture/playback switch on the camera is set to playback, and that the camera is turned on.

Camera set to Take Picture

Camera set to Playback

A Note about Batteries: Using the camera in the live capture or capture from memory process can be wearing on the batteries. It is recommended that the optional AC adapter be used for any Canon camera used for these methods.

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Capture from Memory In this instance, you start out the same way as in the next section: that is, insure the camera is selected as the TWAIN source and doubleclick on the photo block. This will bring up the dialog at the right: Any pictures you have stored on the camera will appear. If these are the images you to insert into your card design, then just select the image and click on the Get Pictures button in the lower right. It is also possible to capture an image from the camera. Select the Take Picture item from the menu in this dialog, and the camera will activate and take a picture. You will not be able to preview the image, so you will need to be sure the person is standing where they need to be and the camera is aimed properly before capturing the image. Once you have clicked on Take Picture, the image will appear in the Thumbnails, and you can select it and use the Get Pictures button to transfer the image to Asure ID. The capture dialog will pop up, and you will then be able to crop the image as necessary.

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Live Capture It is possible to use the Canon as a live capture device—that is, take a picture at the PC just like you would if you were looking through the viewfinder. Start this procedure with the camera turned off. After you start Asure ID make sure the camera is selected in the Image > Select TWAIN Source menu item:

This brings up the dialog below where you select the camera:

Now turn on the camera. This next dialog is brought up by the camera interface:

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To enable the live capture option, select the Remote Shooting tab and click on the button labeled Starts Remote Shooting:

This will now open a dialog to choose where to save any pictures you take. Even though all this is run within Asure ID, the software will not directly insert an image into Asure ID. It needs to be saved somewhere first, then you can select the image to load into Asure ID. This can be a permanent file of images or something to hold it just long enough to produce the card, but it needs to go to memory first before it goes to the card. In this instance, I have selected the Desktop as the place to store the files. This was just short-term storage—I sent the images to the Recycle bin when done. Use the dialog to navigate to where you want the image to be saved. The next dialog to come up is the standard camera dialog. Over the top of that will open the RemoteCaptureTask dialog that allows you to capture an image from the video stream from the camera. There are settings in this dialog to enable/disable the flash and other manual settings, but other than the flash setting you need, I would not alter any of the other settings. The slider at the right of the dialog is to select between close and panorama (zoom in or out), and the Release button will actually capture the image. You will then need to select the image from the next dialog to load it into Asure ID. You can bring up these screens again with Asure ID open by launching the ZoomBrowser EX software from the Start menu.

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