We have an issue where we have four Pickmaster 3.4 PC’s with Windows 7 Pro 32-bit. The PC’s keep getting a BSOD when they are re-booted, we have traced this error to EbNDIS.sys which is the “Ethernet Bus Driver”, the driver is listed as Pleora, We are fairly certain that this is part of the Cognex Drivers and is a result of using the performance drivers in the Ethernet Camera Tool. It appears as though this problem may have been brought up for Windows 7 embedded, but we are also seeing it with Win 7 Pro. This is the excerpt from the Release Notes. We are concerned about not using the performance driver for obvious reasons has anyone else seen this issue? Or more importantly found a solution, we are guessing that there needs to be a driver update from Cognex to deal with Windows 7.
Blue-screen when shutting down the PC (DSE10640)
It has been observed that a PC operating on Windows 7 embedded may get blue-screen while performing system shut-down. The problem only appears when the performance driver for the vision system is installed. As a workaround PickMaster may be used without the performance driver, but with less robust vision communication as a result.
The performance driver is generally required when the PC handles more than two cameras at a fairly high pace (~ >5Hz).
It’s also strongly recommended to use the performance driver with an Intel Pro NIC chipset, like the one delivered with PickMaster.
I am checking with Cognex to see if they have any update. I’ll let you know as soon as I have some result. Btw. do you see the problem on every PC every time you reboot, or is it sporadic?
We have 4 multi robot systems, some of which have 3 cameras, we are using the Intel 2-port gigabit card that comes with PM. I am not sure about the frequency that I will have look into. Should we be concerned not using the performance driver? Yes this happens every time we reboot. This is not a sporadic issue.
The performance driver should always be used under normal circumstances, but often the system is able to perform OK without it. Issues that you would typically see without the driver are failures to acquire image when for example:
-Images are acquired at rapid pace (a few images per second), espcially when using more than one camera since several images can try to enter the PC at the same time.
-The CPU is heavily loaded, either by PickMaster image processing or by other applications running in the background.
-If application windows are dragged around with the mouse. This is a high priority task in MS Windows that can creates peaks in CPU load.
Anyway, in case you’re not using the performance driver and performance is indeed affected you would see this in the log window 4327 and/or 12309. So you would at least ne notified if the system is not functioning properly.