The Kinect, while amazing, is hampered by one big shortcoming — it’s not mobile. Projects are sometimes limited by this and are restricted to indoor settings or areas where the device can at least be plugged in. Mike Fraser and his team realized this and have put it upon themselves to try and come up with a solution. And what they’ve produced is nothing short of brilliant — a mobile, battery powered depth camera based on the Kinect.
Here are the details straight from the developers:
“We have developed a mobile, battery-powered, wireless depth camera based on (and compatible with) Microsoft’s Kinect. In order to promote the use of this device across a wide range of domains, we are making the circuit diagrams and PCB layouts for the additional circuitry available. Our design only uses the front ‘camera’ circuit board of the Kinect, a second bespoke board of the same small size that plugs onto the back of this board in place of the standard large kinect board, which in turn plugs via USB into a Gumstix embedded linux computer running an open source driver and streams via an 802.11n dongle. The design would work equally well with a Raspberry Pi or other SBCs with a bit of hacking.”
After seeing the video, didn’t you think that was cool? Won’t this potentially solve some of the Kinect’s current limitations? I for one am really excited with where this project is headed.
Be sure to check out their website using the link below to learn more about this amazing project.
