ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Support page > USB Viewer

USB Viewer

Overview

The USB viewer on ANY-maze's Support page allows you to see the USB devices attached to the computer, and which USB controllers they are attached to. This is particularly useful if you are using more than one USB camera to track animals in multiple apparatus.

Details

ANY-maze can use multiple cameras to allow simultaneous tracking in more than one apparatus at a time. However, if the cameras used are attached to the ANY-maze computer via USB, then problems may arise if more than a few cameras are used. The reason for this is because of a limit to USB bandwidth - i.e. the amount of data that can be transferred across a USB connection in a given period of time.

Although it might seem that different cameras use different USB ports, so it shouldn't be a problem, in reality the bandwidth limit applies to the USB controller inside the computer, and not the port. So a notebook computer, for example, may have 3 USB ports, but internally they could all connect to the same controller and therefore they share the same bandwidth.

Usually, you can connect around 3 USB cameras to a single controller before you start to run into problems, so if you need more than 3 cameras, you'll need to ensure that they are on different controllers. Fortunately, most computers have multiple USB controllers in them, so you just need to make sure that each of your computer's USB controllers has no more than 3 cameras attached to it.

So how do you know which ports are on which controllers? Well, that's what the USB viewer on the Support page is for. It will show you a list of all the USB ports on your computer, and more importantly, which USB controllers they are connected to:

Figure 1. The USB viewer on the ANY-maze Support page. Note that although there are a total of 7 available USB ports, these all connect to a single USB controller.

By default the option to Only show external USB ports is selected and you will usually want to leave it like this. If you uncheck the box then ports that are used to connect to devices inside your computer (such as a laptop keyboard, a fingerprint reader, etc.) will also be listed, as will internal ports that don't connect to anything, and so-called companion ports.

The USB viewer will dynamically update as devices are inserted and removed, so you can easily plug and unplug your cameras into different USB ports to see which controllers they are connected to.

Click this link to open the USB Viewer now.

Further information

There are more details on using multiple cameras, and what to do if you don't have enough USB connectors in your computer, in the Connecting multiple cameras topic.

See also:

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ANY-maze help topic T0979