Windows 10 Drivers for SR300

[RGreig]

I am looking for some guidance or assistance in getting the SR300 working on Windows 10 recent builds. The camera was working fine on Windows 10 October 2018 Update (build 1803) until around March when a cumulative Windows patch released via Windows Update broke it. All Windows Insiders builds since then (18343 through to 18875) have also failed to work for me. In the Microsoft Feedback Hub, this has been reported by several people including myself but there has been zero traction on getting resolution.

The symptom is that although the camera drivers appear to be installed correctly in device manager, Windows Camera application cannot find the camera and Windows Hello also cannot use the camera ("couldn't turn on the camera"). I have got a user mode dump from the latter failure.

The specific question I have got is: what is the relationship between the Windows drivers and the package on GitHub? I have installed Intel ReleaseSense Viewer v2.19.1 and that application does see the camera and can stream the RGB camera and depth sensor without any issues. So clearly the camera does work when the USB device is interrogated directly.

When I look in device manager, I can see that it has driver version 3.3.27.5718. Is that codebase related in any way to what is running in RealSense Viewer? If not, who updates the windows 10 drivers?

Thanks,

Robert

[MartyG]

Windows Hello frequently has problems with RealSense, so a failure with that does not necessarily mean that the camera will not work at all. The current '400 Series' generation of cameras (D415 and D435) has no support for Windows Hello.

The Camera Explorer tool can also be tempremental in regard to detections. Even if a camera is detected, the tool may not work when you click on the camera to try to start the Explorer's testing tools.

When the SR300 does have installation problems, getting it working can be tricky. Originally, the drivers were installed by downloading and running a program called the Depth Camera Manager (DCM). Later on in the SR300's lifetime, Intel made it possible to install the drivers simply by plugging it into the USB port. More recently though, that method of installation has had problems that can lead to a mis-installed driver.

It sounds though like your SR300 is functioning correctly in the RealSense Viewer, so your driver installation is likely fine.

The SR300 drivers are no longer updated by Intel, as it is an older generation of RealSense product. I believe they are necessary for the camera to function correctly in RealSense SDK 2.0 and its software such as the RealSense Viewer, though they were originally developed for SDK versions created in 2016 that are now retired.

[RGreig]

Thanks Marty for replying so quickly.

I had initially assumed that the SDK would use the windows drivers that were already installed but when looking at the source here https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/tree/master/src/win it appears to me that it is directly interrogating the USB device rather than using some camera abstraction layer in windows. This and the fact that no generic application I've got that uses the camera on windows (not just Windows Hello but even simple apps such as Camera) is able to initialise the camera.

If the camera drivers are no longer being supported by Intel it would be nice if they just released the whole thing on GitHub so that people who want to try to get the device to work on more recent operating system versions can do so rather than just throwing them in the nearest bin.

Thanks,

Robert

[MartyG · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome. :)

The previous generations of cameras (F200, R200, ZR300 and SR300) and their drivers, algorithms and Intel SDKs were not open-source, and so Intel have not released their code (citing that they are the intellectual property of Intel). Even now that the SDKs have transitioned to an open-source development environment with Librealsense2, certain elements of the cameras, such as the firmware driver, are not open-sourced. I can truly appreciate and understand your frustration with being unable to obtain updates for the SR300.