Carlitos’ Contraptions

The 2010 Montreal Comic Con is long over but was a lot of fun and an excellent activity for any geek. It is certainly not as big as the San Diego Comic Con but it is very nice to see that Montreal’s geek community is alive and (slowly) growing. I am not too much into comics but it was a good occasion to be costumed (outside of Halloween).

As you can guess, I am Rorschach.

When Adafruit created a contest rewarding the first person that would create a Linux driver for the Kinect, I immediately went out to get a one of my own. At the time I had the foolish hope of being the first to hack it. This hope crashed into the ground when the Kinect was hacked in three hours by an uber hacker.

Nevertheless, I got a Kinect and libfreenect and en entire OpenKinect project is awesome. The possibilities that the Kinect offers are boundless, whether it is used for robotics, human-computer interaction, 3d scanning, etc.

So far my contributions to the OpenKinect project are not too great and are limited to a Logo candidate. I hope to create some neat applications with the Kinect in the future.

In the meantime, I created a tripod mount for my Kinect using a 1/4″-20 machine nut and some polymorph. This was very easy to achieve and snaps around the Kinect to hold it very firmly. The main goal of this mount was to provide a very firm grip without permanently damaging or modifying the Kinect. See the video below for more details.

As a hint of what to expect in the future, know that my main interest for the Kinect is SLAM and 3D scanning.