Kinect-a-Sketch - WaterlooLabs Ep 05

Hi, I'm Hunter, and I'm Doug and welcome back to WaterlooLabs
the season we need some help, so we did a nationwide search for interns and had over a hundred
applicants and we picked the four best and brightest
to lock in a cubicle and throw hardware at now we need new interns because we
wanted incorporate some new hardware things like the Arduino and the Xbox Kinect
let's go see what they've been working on. Ah let's go
This is the Kinect-a-Sketch
In a mash-up of old school and new school, We've taken Xbox 360 Kinect controller
and an ordinary Etch-a-Sketch, just like you had as a kid, and combined them
using LabVIEW and an Arduino
Today we have the fastest selling electronics device in history
the Xbox Kinect
Kinect!
it operates on a principal called structured light.
An array of regularly spaced infrared dots
like a cloud of invisible laser pointers are projected out into the room.
From this, it calculates the dispersion
the distance of each dot from where it's supposed to be and then it can
calculate a depth image that contains information for every single curve
and contour of objects the Kinect can see. This depth image gets send back to LabVIEW
using a wrapper for the Kinect source development kit.
The SDK was released by Microsoft in order to help hackers like you and I
to figure out how to get Kinect information into our programs so we can track
your hand moving, or a ball flying past or whatever we really feel like.
Here were using the Arduino to controll these stepper motors.
An Arduino is an open-source microcontroller and
a microcontroller is simply put a mini computer.
and as ther name implies stepper motors are motors that move in steps.
We use an Arduino to output digital pulses and every time these
motors receive one of these pulses, they rotate 1.8 degrees.
So, by outputting pluses at different frequencies, we can accurately control the movement of these motors
Then, when we connect the knobs of the Etch-a-Sketch to the motors,
we can accurately controlled what we want to draw.
We're here at the ATX Dev Center, we've got our Kinect-a-Sketch and our giant pencil
The setup's pretty simple.
So the Kinect finds the nearest point in its field of view
and then tracks it as it moves around in space,
filters out of the hi frequency noise and passes that information onto our Arduino
which then sends commands to the two stepper motors and moves it around
I don't know what they're drawing, but it looks amazing!
You know it!
Are you drawing a house?
What is that? a Giraffe?
c'mon.. Don't you know how to use an Etch-a-Sketch?
I got this, man.
You got what?
Sky scrappers, a village
I don't know how long your Etch-a-Sketch is going to survive Fred.
thanks for watching our video, for more information
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This wasn't as easy as I thought when I was watching you guys do it.