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Re: Running the Kinect on the Robot.
-The Kinect we are getting is a standard Kinect, including the AC adapter and cable thingy to connect directly to USB (you would probably need a 12v regulator for the robot)
-I would go with a single-board computer running Linux, and send the data to the cRio via IP. You could send debug data to the driver station while you're at it, if you wanted to. I would probably get all of the useful information out of the image on the co-processor, and feed coordinates or other numerical data back to the robot at the highest rate possible.
-A laptop running Win7 will have (comparatively) high system requirements to an embedded single-board Linux machine, as you aren't running a GUI at all, and you can trim the background processes to just what you need.
-A laptop is very heavy. Just throwing that out there.
-As to power a laptop or other machine, I would probably get an automotive power supply and feed it off of a 12v regulator, since the robot batteries can go down fairly low. Laptop chargers usually run above 12v anyway (the one in front of me is 18.5), so you need a boost converter anyway.
-The FRC Kinect stuff wraps around the Microsoft Kinect SDK (which only runs on Win7), and feeds some stuff to the robot via the Driver Station, including all 20 skeletal coordinates that are tracked. To use the Kinect on the DS, you do not have to write ANY driver station end code, the data is all passed to the robot.
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