Hackaday Podcast 234: Machines On Fire, Old Kinect New Kinect, And Birth Of The Breadboard

September 1, 2023 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

It might sound like a joke, but this week, Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by asking how you keep a Polish train from running. Like always, the answer appears to be a properly modulated radio signal. After a fiery tale about Elliot’s burned beans, the discussion moves over to the adventure that is home CNC ownership, the final chapter in the saga of the Arecibo Telescope, and the unexpected longevity of Microsoft’s Kinect. Then it’s on to the proper way to cook a PCB, FFmpeg in the browser, and a wooden cyberdeck that’s worth carrying around. Finally, they’ll go over the next generation of diode laser engravers, and take a look back at the origins of the lowly breadboard.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download it yourself. You don’t need the cloud!

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 234: Machines On Fire, Old Kinect New Kinect, And Birth Of The Breadboard” →

Microsoft Discontinues Kinect, Again

August 26, 2023 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The Kinect is a depth-sensing camera peripheral originally designed as a accessory for the Xbox gaming console, and it quickly found its way into hobbyist and research projects. After a second version, Microsoft abandoned the idea of using it as a motion sensor for gaming and it was discontinued. The technology did however end up evolving as a sensor into what eventually became the Azure Kinect DK (spelling out ‘developer kit’ presumably made the name too long.) Sadly, it also has now been discontinued.

The original Kinect was a pretty neat piece of hardware for the price, and a few years ago we noted that the newest version was considerably smaller and more capable. It had a depth sensor with selectable field of view for different applications, a high-resolution RGB video camera that integrated with the depth stream, integrated IMU and microphone array, and it worked to leverage machine learning for better processing and easy integration with Azure. It even provided a simple way to sync multiple units together for unified processing of a scene.

In many ways the Kinect gave us all a glimpse of the future because at the time, a depth-sensing camera with a synchronized video stream was just not a normal thing to get one’s hands on. It was also one of the first consumer hardware items to contain a microphone array, which allowed it to better record voices, localize them, and isolate them from other noise sources in a room. It led to many, many projects and we hope there are still more to come, because Microsoft might not be making them anymore, but they are licensing out the technology to companies who want to build similar devices.

3D Scanning A Room With A Steam Deck And A Kinect

April 24, 2023 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

It may not be obvious, but Valve’s Steam Deck is capable of being more than just a games console. Demonstrating this is [Parker Reed]’s experiment in 3D scanning his kitchen with a Kinect and Steam Deck combo, and viewing the resulting mesh on the Steam Deck.

The two pieces of hardware end up needing a lot of adapters and cables.

[Parker] runs the RTAB-Map software package on his Steam Deck, which captures a point cloud and color images while he pans the Kinect around. After that, the Kinect’s job is done and he can convert the data to a mesh textured with the color images. RTAB-Map is typically used in robotic applications, but we’ve seen it power completely self-contained DIY 3D scanners.

While logically straightforward, the process does require some finessing and fiddling to get it up and running. Reliability is a bit iffy thanks to the mess of cables and adapters required to get everything hooked up, but it does work. [Parker] shows off the whole touchy process, but you can skip a little past the five minute mark if you just want to see the scanning in action.

The Steam Deck has actual computer chops beneath its games console presentation, and we’ve seen a Steam Deck appear as a USB printer that saves received print jobs as PDFs, and one has even made an appearance in radio signal direction finding.

Continue reading “3D Scanning A Room With A Steam Deck And A Kinect” →

This Eyeball Watches You Thanks To Kinect Tracking

October 29, 2021 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

Eyeballs are often watching us, but they’re usually embedded in the skull of another human or animal. When they’re staring at you by themselves, they can be altogether more creepy. This Halloween project from [allpartscombined] aims to elicit that exact spooky vibe.

The project relies on a Kinect V2 to do body tracking. It feeds data to a Unity app that figures out how to aim the eyeball at any humans detected in the scene. The app sends angle data to an Arduino over serial, with the microcontroller generating the necessary signals to command servos which move the eyeball.

With tilt and pan servos fitted and the precision tracking from the Kinect data, the eye can be aimed at people in two dimensions. It’s significantly spookier than simply panning the eye back and forth.

The build was actually created by modifying an earlier project to create an airsoft turret, something we’ve seen a few times around these parts. Fundamentally, the tracking part is the same, just in this case, the eye doesn’t shoot at people… yet! Video after the break.

Continue reading “This Eyeball Watches You Thanks To Kinect Tracking” →

Kinect Gave Us A Preview Of The Future, Though Not The One It Intended

November 9, 2020 by Roger Cheng 13 Comments

This holiday season, the video game industry hype machine is focused on building excitement for new PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Ten years ago, a similar chorus of hype reached a crescendo with the release of Xbox Kinect, promising to revolutionize how we play. That vision never panned out, but as [Daniel Cooper] of Engadget pointed out in a Kinect retrospective, it premiered consumer technologies that impacted fields far beyond gaming.

Kinect has since withdrawn from the gaming market, because as it turns out gamers are quite content with handheld controllers. This year’s new controllers for a PlayStation or Xbox would be immediately familiar to gamers from ten years ago. Even Nintendo, whose Wii is frequently credited as motivation for Microsoft to develop the Kinect, have arguably taken a step back with Joy-cons of their Switch.

But the Kinect’s success at bringing a depth camera to consumer price levels paved the way to explore many ideas that were previously impossible. The flurry of enthusiastic Kinect hacking proved there is a market for depth camera peripherals, leading to plug-and-play devices like Intel RealSense to make depth-sensing projects easier. The original PrimeSense technology has since been simplified and miniaturized into Face ID unlocking Apple phones. Kinect itself found another job with Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset. And let’s not forget the upcoming wave of autonomous cars and drones, many of which will see their worlds via depth sensors of some kind. Some might even be equipped with the latest sensor to wear the Kinect name.

Inside the Kinect was also one of the earliest microphone arrays sold to consumers. Enabling the Kinect to figure out which direction a voice is coming from, and isolate it from other noises in the room. Such technology were previously the exclusive domain of expensive corporate conference room speakerphones, but now it forms the core of inexpensive home assistants like an Amazon Echo Dot. Raising the bar so much that hacks needed many more microphones just to stand out.

With the technology available more easily elsewhere, attrition of a discontinued device is reflected in the dwindling number of recent Kinect hacks on these pages. We still see a cool project every now and then, though. As the classic sensor bar itself recedes into history, others will take its place to give us depth sensing and smart audio. But for many of us, Kinect was the ambitious videogame peripheral that gave us our first experience.

New Kinect Sensor Switch Focus From Gamers To Developers

February 26, 2019 by Roger Cheng 31 Comments

Microsoft’s Kinect may not have found success as a gaming peripheral, but recognizing that a depth sensor is too cool to leave for dead, development continued even after Xbox gaming peripherals were discontinued. This week their latest iteration emerged and we can get it in the form of Azure Kinect DK. This is a developer’s kit focused on exploring new applications for this technology, not a gaming peripheral we had to hack before we could use in our own projects.

Packaged into a peripheral that plugs into a PC via USB-C, it is more than the core depth sensor module announced last year but less than a full consumer product. Browsing its 10-page specification (PDF) with comparisons to second generation Kinect sensor bar, we see how this technology has evolved. Physical size and weight has dropped, as has power consumption. Auxiliary capabilities has improved with an expanded microphone array, IMU with gyro in addition to accelerometer, and the RGB camera has been upgraded to 4K resolution.

But the star of the show is a new continuous-wave time-of-flight depth sensor, presented at the 2018 IEEE ISSCC conference. (Full text requires IEEE membership, but a digest form is available via ResearchGate.) Among its many advancements, we expect the biggest impact to be its field of view. Default of 75 x 65 degrees is already better than its predecessors (64 x 45 for first generation Kinect, 70 x 60 for second) but there is an option to trade resolution for coverage by switching to a wide-angle mode of 120 x 120 degrees. Significantly wider than other depth cameras like Intel’s RealSense D400 series or Occipital’s Structure.

Another interesting feature is built-in synchronization. Many projects using multiple Kinect sensors ran into problems because they interfered with each other. People hacked around the problem, of course, but now they don’t have to: commodity 3.5 mm jacks allow multiple Azure Kinect DK to be daisy chained together so they play nicely and take turns.

From its name we were worried this product would require Microsoft’s Azure cloud service in some way and be crippled without it. Based on information released so far, it appears developers have access to all the same data streams as previous sensors. Azure tie-in takes the form of optional SDKs that make it easier to do things like upload data for processing in Azure cloud-based recognition services.

And finally, Azure Kinect DK’s price tag of $399 is significantly higher than a Kinect game peripheral, but it is a low volume product for developers. Perhaps high volume consumer products built on this technology will cost less, but that remains to be seen. In the meantime, you have alternative tools for solving similar problems. For example if you are building your own AR headset, you might use Intel’s latest RealSense camera for vision based inside-out motion tacking.

Kinect Visualizer Demo Gives Winamp A Run For Its Money

November 11, 2018 by Drew Littrell 9 Comments

Winamp eat your heart out, because thanks to the Microsoft Kinect in the hands of [Samarth] there’s a new way to make your screen dance along with you. He created a music visualizer demo that takes advantage of the 3D depth camera on Kinect by outputting a fun pixelated silhouette and color changing strobe. When there are big high-hat hits or bass thumps the camera feed reacts accordingly (as any good visualizer would). He even uploaded his code for the project just in case anyone would like to take a look at it.

The visualizer utilizes the OpenKinect-Processing library which has provided the backbone to many other similar Kinect art projects. It was specifically created to provide a quicker way for coders to access the raw color and depth data output by Kinect. It’s creator, Daniel Shiffman, has posted a number of tutorials to aid anyone looking to create their own real-time animations as well.

The visualizer demo (see video below) was created as part of Maker Faire Hyderabad which is happening over the weekend. The expo is the city’s first Maker Faire and is set to feature over 200 maker exhibits across multiple disciplines. It’s always great to see maker communities outside of the ones that are closest to you geographically speaking, so hopefully we’ll see many more like [Samarth] taking part in more maker events in the future.

Continue reading “Kinect Visualizer Demo Gives Winamp A Run For Its Money” →