The official python wrapper for the Basler pylon Camera Software Suite.

Background information about usage of pypylon, programming samples and jupyter notebooks can also be found at pypylon-samples.

Please Note: This project is offered with no technical support by Basler AG. You are welcome to post any questions or issues on GitHub or on ImagingHub.

Getting Started

• Install pylon
  This is strongly recommended but not mandatory. See known issues for further details.
• Install pypylon: pip3 install pypylon
  For more installation options and the supported systems please read the Installation paragraph.
• Look at samples/grab.py or use the following snippet:

from pypylon import pylon

camera = pylon.InstantCamera(pylon.TlFactory.GetInstance().CreateFirstDevice())
camera.Open()

# demonstrate some feature access
new_width = camera.Width.GetValue() - camera.Width.GetInc()
if new_width >= camera.Width.GetMin():
    camera.Width.SetValue(new_width)

numberOfImagesToGrab = 100
camera.StartGrabbingMax(numberOfImagesToGrab)

while camera.IsGrabbing():
    grabResult = camera.RetrieveResult(5000, pylon.TimeoutHandling_ThrowException)

    if grabResult.GrabSucceeded():
        # Access the image data.
        print("SizeX: ", grabResult.Width)
        print("SizeY: ", grabResult.Height)
        img = grabResult.Array
        print("Gray value of first pixel: ", img[0, 0])

    grabResult.Release()
camera.Close()

Installation

Prerequisites

• Installed pylon
  For the binary installation this is not mandatory but strongly recommended. See known issues for further details.
• Installed python with pip

Binary Installation

The easiest way to get pypylon is to install a prebuild wheel. Binary releases for most architectures are available on pypi**. To install pypylon open your favourite terminal and run:

pip3 install pypylon

The following versions are available on pypi:

	3.4	3.5	3.6	3.6	3.7	3.8	3.9	3.10
Windows 32bit	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
Windows 64bit	x	x	x	x	x	x	x	x
Linux x86_64**	-*	-*	x	x	x	x	x	x
Linux armv7l**	-*	-*	x	x	x	x	x	x
Linux aarch64**	-*	-*	x	x	x	x	x	x
Mac OS***	-	-	x	x	x	x	x	x

Additional Notes on binary packages:

• (*) The linux wheels for python 3.4 and 3.5 are not available on pypi.
  You can get them from Github Releases.
• (**) The linux binaries are manylinux_2_24 conformant.
  This is roughly equivalent to a minimum glibc version >= 2.24.
  ⚠️ You need at least pip 20.3 to install them.
• (***) MacOS binaries are built for macOS >= 10.14 (Mojave)

Installation from Source

Building the pypylon bindings is supported and tested on Windows and Linux.

You need a few more things to compile pypylon:

• A compiler for your system (Visual Studio on Windows, gcc on linux)
• Python development files (e.g. sudo apt install python-dev on linux)
• swig >= 4.0

To build pypylon from source:

git clone https://github.com/basler/pypylon.git
cd pypylon
pip install .

Development

Pull requests to pypylon are very welcome. To help you getting started with pypylon improvements, here are some hints:

Starting Development

python setup.py develop

This will "link" the local pypylon source directory into your python installation. It will not package the pylon libraries and always use the installed pylon. After changing pypylon, execute python setup.py build and test...

Running Unit Tests

NOTE: The unit tests try to import pypylon...., so they run against the installed version of pypylon.

python -m unittest tests/....
python tests/....

Known Issues

• For USB 3.0 cameras to work on Linux, you need to install appropriate udev rules. The easiest way to get them is to install the official pylon package.