Kinect Updates Thread
 

So everybody found their Kinect in their kit of parts today right? Well, I created this thread for everyone to share "discoveries" they made about it. For example, when somebody cracks the "How to connect the Kinect to the cRIO" conundrum, please post it here so everybody can see it. Good luck with Rebound Rumble, from Team 2073!

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

Not even going to open ours this year.

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

To connect to cRIO: place pandaboard running linux on robot to interface between the kinect and the cRIO. Program the pandaboard to do all of your image processing, outputing only a x,y and distance value to the cRIO. from other threads it seems like you should get ~30 fps processed this way, depending on how intensive your code is. of course, all power connections have to be done custom.

As an extra option, do not connect the pandaboard to the cRIO, but instead get it approved to communicate with your driver station laptop via wifi, per [R67]

If you did this, you could probably just do all the image processing on your driver station laptop, and view the image besides.

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

Forgot to put R55 in there:

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

You Kinect or your Kit?

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

Kinect. My mentality is that I would rather take the human factor out of the "hybrid" mode and have an effective and precise autonomous robot over the non intuitive controls that the Kinect provides. I rather use the time messing with the Kinect giving lectures on some basic theory on control theory and give the rookies an overview of the whole process and the math behind it.

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

There's a thread in the programming section which really got going. Basically, putting the kinect on the robot is going to cost your team roughly $200 and programming time. While I didn't know about [R67], the hardware required to process the USB signal and send it back amounts to a computer -- the devboards being the lighter and cheaper of the two options (devboard/laptop).

What also needs to be considered... Will it be helpful in either case? Like davidthefat was saying, it is somewhat unintuitive, as well as not necessarily providing any useful information. I could only see wanting to provide the robot with static information, which could be accomplished in some other, non-error-prone way. Or, assuming you did get it working on the robot, would the depth data from the IR camera really be helpful? You should know distance based on your starting position anyway.

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

You could always put another laptop on the robot and have it communicate that way.

Re: Kinect Updates Thread
 

Note that if you find the default gestures non intuitive you can program your own. The sample code is fairly well documented.