For all you teledildonics enthusiasts, there’s a new Vibrator shield for the Arduino. It gets better: you can use the Pen15 shield with a Kinect for wholesome and natural fun at home.
Decency and a ‘safe for work’ style prevents us from putting everything we know on the front page, so keep reading after the break.
Continue reading “Join The Pen15 Club With A Vibrator Shield”
The Kinect is an interesting beast. On one hand, it’s fantastic for hacking – a purpose for which it was not designed. On the other hand, it’s “just OK” when it comes to gaming – its entire reason for being.
One of the big complaints regarding the Kinect’s control scheme is that it’s no good for games such as first person shooters, where a large majority of the action involves walking, jumping, and aiming. For his Master’s project, [Alex Poolton] put together a fantastic demonstration showing how the Kinect can be paired with a standard Xbox controller to provide hybrid gaming input.
While you might expect a simple game that shows the fundamentals of the hybrid control system, he has put together a full fledged game demo that shows how this control scheme might be implemented in a real game. [Alex] admits that it’s still a bit rough around the edges, but there’s some real potential in his design.
Continue reading to see a video demonstration of [Alex’s] project in action, and be sure to check out his blog for news and updates on the project.
Continue reading “Hybrid Control Scheme Using An Xbox Game Pad And Kinect”
[Malte] is a loyal Hackaday reader and neurobiology PhD candidate with a keen interest in hobby robotics – definitely our kind of guy! He wrote in to share a project he has been working on in his spare time, a Kinect-controlled delta robot (Google translation).
Deltares, as it is called, is pretty straightforward as far as delta robots are concerned. It uses three servos to actuate the arms, which are controlled by an AVR micro running BASCOM. The AVR gets its coordinate data from his computer via a serial connection after it has been captured by the Kinect. [Malte] opted to use Microsoft’s official SDK for the project, processing the Kinect skeletal data using a small C# application he wrote.
The end result is pretty neat as you can see in the pair of videos below. In the first video, [Malte] uses Deltares as a plotter, drawing a crude face on a piece of paper with a marker. In the second, he commands Deltares with his right hand, using his left to activate the magnetic solenoid to pick up the steel spheres.
It looks pretty cool to us, and we’d love to see what sorts of things he puts together if he ever ends up making robotics his career rather than a hobby.
Continue reading “Kinect-controlled Delta Robot Has A Magnetic Personality”
We know that the appearance of the Kinect 3D camera hardware, and subsequent open source driver hacking conquest, is a game-changer that brings the real world into much closer contact with the virtual world. But it still amazes us when we see a concept like this turntable-based 3D object scanner that works so incredibly well.
The concept is extremely simple. A box made from foamboard rests atop a turntable. At its center is the object you wish to scan being well-lit by a small LED light source at each upper corner of the box. First up some code and capture data about the sides and top of the object as it spins. To put the shoe back together in the virtual world, he used a modified version of RGBDemo v0.6.0, a Kinect focused project written by Nicolas Burrus.
[A.J] says that the scan comes out pretty well after just one pass, but that’s not stopping him from setting his sights on making this work with three of four Kinects at once. Don’t forget to check out his video demonstration which is embedded after the break.
Continue reading “Kinect-based Turntable 3D Scanner Looks Very Promising”
This friendly little monkey is the latest creation from [Jan Sieber] and [Ralph Kistler]. Yes it’s another Kinect Hack, the Kinect tracks the users stance using the OpenNI Framework and OSCeleton. The information is sent to an Arduino crammed inside the monkey, also inside the poor little monkey are 10 servo motors and a nightmarish wire skeleton. The monkey is left dangling from the Kinect sensor by several cables, ready to follow your every move. The monkey seems fairly sprightly for someone who has had all their insides removed, it is able to copy a multitude of stances quite swiftly.
The video after the break shows the monkey in action for about 1 minute. Then the team go through the build and application of the clever little monkey in a musical/documentary style video. There is also a creepy section where the monkey draws its own skeleton then freaks out.. Enjoy..
The Kinect has been hacked for many purposes, but this Android implementation tutorial is the first we’ve heard of it being used on a mobile phone platform. Although not a finished product at this point, [Raymond’s] tutorial is a good starting point for those wanting to experiment with fusing these two technologies.
The Kinect programming for this tutorial has been done with the Tegra Ventana development kit for Android 3.0. An Ubuntu-Linux installation is used, but this technique should be portable to any Linux system according to the author.
The procedure given is pretty straightforward, and the author even provides an example of the results in a video after the break. It’s interesting to note that, when connected, the Kinect is seen as two devices, “Xbox NUI Camera” and “Xbox NUI audio”. We look forward to new hacks to come out for this device, possibly using this set of tools. Continue reading “Programming The Kinect To Work With Android”
In 2009, while Microsoft was busy designing and marketing what would become the Kinect, [Carlos Anzola], an inventor, tinkerer, and self-ascribed geek from Bogotá, Colombia, had been working for years on a nearly identical gesture interface for the PC. His creation, the Human interface Electronic Device, or HiE-D – pronounced ‘Heidi’ – was capable of gesture recognition years before Microsoft would release the Kinect.
After developing his gesture recognition device in 2007, Microsoft showed interest in [Carlos]’ device – going so far as to request a prototype. Microsoft suggested that he should apply for a patent on his technology. [Carlos] did just that, sending in patent applications to both the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization a mere two days before the announcement of Project Natal and a full seven months before Microsoft applied for their Kinect patent.
Since the release of the Kinect, [Carlos] has been showing the HiE-D around Bogotá and has put a few videos of his technology up on Youtube, one of which can be seen below. You can also check out his Youtube channel for some great demos.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5jfOJ3TwyI&w=470]
