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Strong Contender Already For Adafruit's Kinect Challenge
sammyF70 writes "Adafruit's bounty on open source drivers for Microsoft's Kinect may have been already won. Someone called 'KinectMan2' has posted videos of Kinect's output as seen on Windows 7 to YouTube. That was fast. Hopefully Linux drivers are coming soon."
A few more details are available on a forum post the man made. Adafruit said the bounty could be his if he posts the source code, and they also upped the reward to $3,000 in response to another silly statement from Microsoft.
Microsoft issued a pretty nasty response the last time this was posted in the public. That could have... helped.
There is an article on engadget that says the guy doesn't necessarily want to publish his driver :
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/07/kinect-does-hackers-bidding-but-not-for-fortune-or-fame-video/
Maybe that's why the bounty was raised.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The internal OS of what? The Kinect? Unlikely. Check the iFixit teardown. The device is pretty basic in terms of processing capabilities, relying on the Xbox to do most of the heavy lifting. Or are you referring to the Xbox? If so, you're still wrong. The Xbox 360 OS is not Windows CE. About the closest you can come to comparing it to another existing OS is by looking at its lineage. The Xbox 360 OS was derived from the original Xbox OS, which in turn was derived from Windows 2000. The extent that the Xbox 360 OS resembles Windows 2000 is almost certainly miniscule at this point, as it runs on an architecture that is not supported by the Windows codebase and does not need most of the core functionality of a Windows OS (shell, explorer, etc). There are probably some bits and pieces of Windows 2000 kernel code still lurking around somewhere, but aside from exposing DirectX and some minimal win32 functionality that's really about it.
There is software that can intercept (called filter in windows) usb communication.
google for "usb port monitor"
The extent that the Xbox 360 OS resembles Windows 2000 is almost certainly miniscule at this point, as it runs on an architecture that is not supported by the Windows codebase and does not need most of the core functionality of a Windows OS (shell, explorer, etc).
NT4 had full PPC support, and Windows 2000 maintained at least some portability features because there was a release for Alpha. In addition, DirectX has to run on the Xbox operating system. For these reasons and others (being able to build the same game for Xbox 360 or for PC) it is a virtual certainty that the Xbox OS still deserves to be called Windows NT. It runs the same damned software!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Adafruit stipulated that the driver source must be released as open source. I see that happening next Tuesday, when hell freezes over.
"Lame" - Galaxar
It would have been possible for you to respond much more directly to that statement. The iFixit article makes it very clear that the Kinect does pretty hefty onboard processing, resulting in sending a color image and a depth map over what is essentially USB. It's pretty clear that the depth map essentially includes recognition of object positions which is calibrated onboard the Kinect with the information from the microphones, so that the information send to the XBox includes object position along with pre-processed audio for the position of any object. It appears that the Kinect recognizes you as an object and will pan to center you better in the frame all by itself. Did you even look at the array of discrete processors on page 2 of the article? While it may be doubtful that the Kinect runs WinCE, it's quite clear that the XBox does NOT do most of the heavy lifting in processing the image and sound data. Quite the opposite - it looks as though the Kinect provides quite a lot of processed information along with a relatively small amount of raw data. There are no doubt some control commands from the XBox without which the Kinect will not function (i.e. it won't operate by itself with just power), but this most likely is fairly simple message passing which can be reverse engineered with relative ease.
If I were in the position to do so, I would get an in-line logic analyzer just to look at it myself.
Stop being an attention whoring second rate electronics kit seller for third rate geeks and build your own damn hardware.
I don't know if you got ripped off by AdaFruit some time in the past or what, but this statement is pretty unfair. AdaFruit has some good prices on various electronic bits that can be a pain in the ass to find elsewhere. What's more, they've made a name for themselves as a trustworthy vendor, so when folks buy bits and pieces from AdaFruit, they know they will get quick, quality hardware, unlike some other online vendors that seem to have trouble tracking their orders and getting sales to their customers doors in a respectable timeframe.
As for the jab about third rate geeks, well that's just some foul elitism on your part. AdaFruit and LadyAda.net offer some straightforward, accessible, free electronics tutorials complete with source code and pictures. For folks who just want to dabble and hobby around in electronics, this is a great resource that doesn't require the rigorous study of electrical engineering in order to learn how to make a cool, flashy LED toy that they can show off to their friends. Furthermore, said guides are simple enough that they can be used in young classrooms (as in elementary to middle school) and can provide up and coming geeks inspiration for continuing in the technical fields. This is a priceless quality in some societies where academic and scientific competency are mocked and scorned.
So all in all, I have to say that AdaFruit, their customers, and their business partners are all entities that I support quite strongly. They offer valuable services and products to those that need them. If such products and services are, "below," an uber-geek like yourself (I have to assume you are one, to write such scornful and condescending words), well then don't use them. However, scorning any tech company for helping to lower the bar of entry into the engineering and technical fields is just putrid elitism at its worst. It only gets lonely at the top is when you intentionally block others from the path to the summit.
So keep your condescending misinformed crap to yourself. Some of us truly value the idea of living in a world where peers with common technical interests are not few and far between.
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it does look promising but it has me wondering if it's real since they have what Adafruit required in functionality but want an extra $7k($3k+$7k=$10k) to release the code and documentation. The original designer of the Kinect device technology( PrimeSense ) provides an SDK and DDK to work with it's reference design. What's to say what we're seeing in this video is not the PrimeSense SDK and driver and not a hack of the Microsoft Kinect USB data streams?
It could be real but it has my antenna up wondering how real it is. If PrimeSense didn't create the design and Microsoft did, then I'd be less prone to question this but we all know that the Kinect is a PrimeSense product with Microsoft's tweaking. It would be great if Microsoft did not encrypt or munge the USB data and it is to the original PrimeSense ref spec since PrimeSense is probably more inclined to want to sell chips and license the design as opposed to wanting to limit sales and tie sales to only one other device.
So show us that the supposed demo of Kinect's output is really from custom made software and not something either pulled from Microsoft or PrimeSense. Show us you're not just using their code to get $10K to do the real work of creating something which can be open sourced.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Why?
To me you seem to be espousing a very ridiculous notion: that there's something wrong with buying somebody's hardware and doing something with it. And Adafruit is offering to pay somebody for the documentation.
So, if their evil plan succeeds, horror of horrors, people might buy a Kinect to do something with it.