competition kinect
 

Hey everyone,

How does the driver station connect to the Kinect at competitions? Is it through the Field Management System or is it through usb? Is the driver station required to have the kinect server installed or will it be a client to the server that is hosted by field management?

thanks for the help

Re: competition kinect
 

The Kinect at the field side connects to your DS computer through a USB extension cable so it should work on the field exactly like it does in your practice environment (so yes you should have the SDK Beta 2 and FRC Kinect Server installed).

Re: competition kinect
 

It has also been officially tested by microsoft to insure proper response time over a "long" cable, so hopefully there won't be any response delays at competition.

Re: competition kinect
 

Why is it implemented this way?

Wouldn't it make more sense for the kinect data to be processed by the computer that is running kinect kiosk?
Then that computer would send the skeleton data to the team's kinect server which would interpret the joints and convert that to joystick commands.
This way:
* the USB cord is acting within normal USB specs (it uses the cord that comes with the kinect);
* the skeleton data is sent at the same rate to all teams (with the classmate PC, I have seen lag of up to 2 seconds. Not very safe).

Re: competition kinect
 

What confuses me about this is that the way I take it, they are splitting the usb cable from the kinect in 3 so that each DS has an end, but only one is allowed to plug it in... Am I wrong here? And if not, how do they split the cable like that?

Re: competition kinect
 

It's 1 cable that reaches all 3 Driver Stations