Kinect & SDK

Overview

The project development is under-way and this blog post details the steps to configure the Kinect and SDK for development. It goes on to talk about how the choice to use Visual Basics is causing problems and proposes to move to developing the system in C#.

Background

After long delays in receiving the Kinect work can begin on the development on Kinect. This blog will be written during the first phase of experimenting with the Kinect and its abilities.  

Activity

Installing the SDK for the Kinect (version 1.7) is already proving difficult. Having difficulty getting the computer to open the set-up files downloaded from the Microsoft website.

After numerous attempts of downloading, restarting and trying to run the set-up file there is still no success. An attempt is to be made of installing an old SDK (version 1.0). This still does not open with that version.

I have plugged the Kinect straight in the a USB port and is connecting and reconnecting itself repeatedly  Progress is not good.

Next option is to uninstall .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 then reinstall and try again

Everything has been reinstalled and Kinect SDK still not loading.

Install would run in safe mode, but stopped with no error message. Loaded in normal mode disabled all services using MSCONFIG.EXE and as well as changing the compatibility options to "Windows 7" and checking run as admin tick box even though that had been done using right click before. 

After 2 hours all drivers were installed successfully

Using Kinect with Visual Basic

Once the drivers are installed I need to add the Kinect library to the project by using Object Browser and connected the Kinect SDK DLL file and adding it to the Application to be compiled with the program.

Over the last few hours I have been experimenting and trailing different features using tutorials and sample code. This can led me to discover that using visual basic for the Kinect has a limited number of resources compared to C#. This is leading me the think about using C# rather then VB. This has implication on the VB testing currently been done on the Arduino. 

Conclusion

The conclusion of today is that the original plan to use VB with the Kinect, is not the best choice. From now on C# will be used to develop the Kinect application.

Next Step

The next step is to write an application to display the Kinect RGB camera