Kinect LabView Drivers

[Andrew Schreiber]

How are you connecting the Kinect to the CRIO? I was going to work in a similar project but didn't want to commit funds until I figured out how to connect it.

[Ryan Gordon]

It's actually just USB to my laptop at the moment, sorry I didn't make that clear beforehand. I don't have a cRIO available to me yet at the moment so I haven't had a chance to investigate that.

However, the USB interface is seriously complex, especially with the fact that we have to deal with isochronous transfers for video and audio. It might be possible to strip the USB and power cables and connect the data wires to the DIO board and the power distribution board respectively.

Just to note, the newer cRIO's have a USB interface port.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Ryan Gordon

Just to note, the newer cRIO's have a USB interface port.

They do? The NI 9074 I have at work (purchased less than 3 months ago) does not...

[Ryan Gordon]

Check this one out: http://tinyurl.com/2bjsqx7

Either way we should look for a solution with the DIO board since that will probably be the most natural interface to work with when wiring up the Kinect. It would actually probably be pretty easy to put together a tutorial on creating a male usb to the individual power wire and the I/O wires that can be connected to the Kinect. Could be as simple as buying the Kinect legacy extension from Fry's or the like, and cutting off the ends of the wires, stripping them, and wiring them appropriately.

[Greg McKaskle]

On the USB subject, the cRIO family has lots of variety, and some have a USB port. Last I checked, the USB stack exclusively supported the storage protocol. It was used to provide a file storage interface to a USB stick.

True, drivers for other device types could be written, but doing so for VXWorks and keeping the RT aspects in mind are not so easy, so the other device types will not be supported unless there is a good reason for NI to purchase or build the necessary drivers.

I wouldn't really worry about the USB issue though. Exploring and learning about the kinect using a laptop sounds like an incredibly beneficial journey. Please keep it up. And if you are interested in sharing your results, please consider also posting them to NIWeb as you may get a good number of power users interested.

Greg McKaskle

[Ryan Gordon]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

On the USB subject, the cRIO family has lots of variety, and some have a USB port. Last I checked, the USB stack exclusively supported the storage protocol. It was used to provide a file storage interface to a USB stick.

True, drivers for other device types could be written, but doing so for VXWorks and keeping the RT aspects in mind are not so easy, so the other device types will not be supported unless there is a good reason for NI to purchase or build the necessary drivers.

I wouldn't really worry about the USB issue though. Exploring and learning about the kinect using a laptop sounds like an incredibly beneficial journey. Please keep it up. And if you are interested in sharing your results, please consider also posting them to NIWeb as you may get a good number of power users interested.

Greg McKaskle

Ah, I did not consider that. Yes, it would be difficult to interface with the Kinect without a host USB controller.

I've attached my source code here even though it doesn't have depth or camera data working yet. I've certainly learned a lot from this experience, it's been really rewarding.

I'll probably end up changing it all up to use a dll generated from the https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect/ library. LabView doesn't have isochronous USB support so that will be necessary in the end anyway but I wanted to see how far I could get with the raw VISA interface.

To setup the Kinect to your PC using the labview libraries you'll need to use the VISA Driver Wizard to create a NI-VISA driver for the Xbox NUI Motor and Xbux NUI Camera. Audio isn't necessary since at the moment it hasn't been reverse engineered yet.

Once that's been done it's as simple as open up core.vi and running it. If the Kinect is working and the driver was setup right it will autodetect the usb port it's running on and initialize the motor and accelerometer, etc.

http://ryangordon.net/libfreenect.zip

Uploading isn't working here for some reason.

[ygd]

You could theoretically program the FPGA on the cRIO to act as a USB host, and from there, you could control the Kinect. I haven't actually tried it, but it seams feasable.

[jhersh]

Originally Posted by ygd

You could theoretically program the FPGA on the cRIO to act as a USB host, and from there, you could control the Kinect. I haven't actually tried it, but it seams feasable.

The FPGA could theoretically implement the host controller features, but you would still need a USB phy (physical layer interface) to host the USB electrically. Also, the host controller is terribly complex and not really a reasonable engineering approach. You would be far better off using a device that already has a USB host controller (such as the cRIO 9022 mentioned earler, a laptop, a TI Beagle Board, or even a Luminary (now TI) Stellaris part with USB OTG support).

[Ryan Gordon]

I've got the LabView drivers fully working but still not completely stable yet. The dlls that run behind the scenes still need a lot of polishing but this is a great start so far. The next big challenge will be to find a reliable/easy way to get the Kinect to run through the cRIO as we wait for the dlls to stabilize.

I'll hopefully have the development source code up in my github repository within the next weeks.

Cheers,
Ryan

[Gdeaver]

Aside from getting the data into the c-rio, there is the raw computational power of doing anything useful with the data. Wouldn't a better strategy be getting the data back to the driver station lap top and do the processing there?
A 400 mhz power pc vs. a dual core x86? The c-rio could be by passed completely. A usb host controller interfaces to the kinect and then sends it by lan to the gaming router back to the laptop. First would have to change the
ruling on no lasers. I believe the Kinect has a true infrared laser. The kinect could have tremendous affect on our robots in the future. You may want to keep an eye on Microsoft's robotic studio. Word has it they may be releasing some drivers.

[Ryan Gordon]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

Aside from getting the data into the c-rio, there is the raw computational power of doing anything useful with the data. Wouldn't a better strategy be getting the data back to the driver station lap top and do the processing there?
A 400 mhz power pc vs. a dual core x86? The c-rio could be by passed completely. A usb host controller interfaces to the kinect and then sends it by lan to the gaming router back to the laptop. First would have to change the
ruling on no lasers. I believe the Kinect has a true infrared laser. The kinect could have tremendous affect on our robots in the future. You may want to keep an eye on Microsoft's robotic studio. Word has it they may be releasing some drivers.

This wasn't ever meant to be used during competition in FIRST The laser is a Level 1 Class laser but it's perfectly safe as there is a million safety features that PrimeSense and Microsoft built in to make sure it stays safe.

But the showstopper here is that there is too much interference with multiple Kinect's moving around. I'm just building this so I can make a robot do things by itself autonomously; The idea of true autonomy is very poorly implemented in FIRST, mainly because the complexity and lack of technology to make it more plausible. I quite think this would help others interested in exploring truly autonomous robots. Every year that passes by goes more decommissioned pieces of metal that never get put into competition again and I quite think this would make for some interesting projects with those old robots. That is certainly what I'd like to do off-season with them.

[Brandon_L]

I am EXTREMELY interested in this. Do you plan on releasing it when its done?

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by Ryan Gordon

Check this one out: http://tinyurl.com/2bjsqx7

Either way we should look for a solution with the DIO board since that will probably be the most natural interface to work with when wiring up the Kinect. It would actually probably be pretty easy to put together a tutorial on creating a male usb to the individual power wire and the I/O wires that can be connected to the Kinect. Could be as simple as buying the Kinect legacy extension from Fry's or the like, and cutting off the ends of the wires, stripping them, and wiring them appropriately.

The problem is not in getting the Kinect physically wired to the cRIO, the problem is that the FRC cRIO does not have a USB Host Controller.

I could see someone getting a Kinect running on a robot using a mini-ITX motherboard with a SSD drive. Another option would be to get it running on a microcontroller. I will likely be working on using the Kinect with a Luminary Micro 3000 series chip at work sometime in the next few months, but I'm not certain I will have anything there before kickoff.