

- MONITOR WITH CROSSHAIR OVERLAY FULL
- MONITOR WITH CROSSHAIR OVERLAY SOFTWARE
- MONITOR WITH CROSSHAIR OVERLAY CODE
What I normally do when I'm using the webcam is to have it running on a separate computer (e.g.

Instead, keep the crosshairs in one place and move the webcam using the router to measure dimensions. The webcam gives a slightly distorted image. Just play around with the keys and see what you can do!Īlthough the crosshairs window displays numbers showing the crosshair position, size etc., I wouldn't attempt to try using the crosshairs window to actually measure the dimensions of parts.
MONITOR WITH CROSSHAIR OVERLAY FULL
There is a choice of eight different crosshair patterns, any colour of crosshairs you like, and full control over crosshair thickness, size, position, and rotation. These are detailled in the readme.txt file in both the above ZIP archives. Once you show and then pin the crosshairs window, there are a whole list of keys which are active within the crosshairs window. Resize to fit video does what it says, although I find you have to choose it several times for the window to resize properly. Video format and Video source let you adjust all the webcam settings as you would normally.

The main menu options are pretty self-explanatory.
MONITOR WITH CROSSHAIR OVERLAY CODE
VB6 source code here, and the installer program here. I know it's perhaps a rather perverse way of doing it, but it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to do a direct overlay on the video feed.Īnd here's the result. The second form has the crosshairs etc drawn on it, but its background is transparent, so you can see the video through it. The solution I came up with was to use a second form placed on top of the video. However, this only lets you get a video feed into the form - there is no way of overlaying graphics directly Fortunately there is an ActiveX control called ezVidCap ( ) which, although old, is very easy to use. There are hardly any simple ways of doing this - most involve miles of code to grab video directly through Windows, which I couldn't be bothered with. I thought it would be a simple matter to get a webcam feed into a VB6 form and overlay crosshairs, but it was far from simple. So, I decided to have a go at writing my own.
MONITOR WITH CROSSHAIR OVERLAY SOFTWARE
There is an existing piece of software called CentreCam which can display crosshairs on top of a webcam feed, but I thought the software was a bit clunky and not very flexible. Mach3 does have the capability to display a webcam feed, but this feature is absent from Mach2, and I didn't want to mess up a working setup by upgrading to Mach3. I currently use Mach2 to control the router. The software part of things was not so easy. I set the lens so it focuses at about 3cm distance. A few screws mounted it to the underside of the Z axis (vertical axis) on the router. I got a webcam off EBay which said it had a metal body (turned out it did actually). Lots of people use cheap webcams mounted on the spindle to center in on parts, so I decided to lash one up. When I was experimenting with automatic CNC drilling of PCBs, I needed some way of accurately aligning the machine to the origin of the circuit board. For a much better software solution, please see my new page Webcam crosshairs using Processing.
