Month: May 2018

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Kinect V2 conversion

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I have bought a used Kinect V2 (the Xbox One version) and converted it for PC usage. This eliminates the need of an overly expensive kinect-to-USB adapter cable. The kinect itself uses a modified version of a USB B 3.0 plug. The only modification is that it also carries the 12V required to run the sensors.
And you can actually feed the 12V through the extra pin directly and use a normal USB B 3.0 cable for your PC to connect. I won’t go over the process in Detail, but it is quite easy to do anyway:
Step 1 Open the Kinect up (you need to peel off some glued on stickers that cover the screws on the bottom)

Step 2 Solder a power cable to the respective Pin and Ground.
Step 3 Close it back up.
After this you just need a 12V 3A power supply and connect that to the soldered on connection. The rest is a thing of installing the kinect sdk on the PC for it to recognize the kinect correctly.
For this I followed several tutorials to make sure I make the correct steps.

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Making a “Useless Box / Useless Machine” as a birthday present

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When trying to think of a nice birthday present for a friend I came up with one of these “useless machines” we both love the thought of.
So my final plan was: have a more complex, arduino controlled useless machine that is still programmable and runs of an easily removable USB power bank. This way the this becomes a 2-in-1 gift: the power bank and the actual mechanism.

My initial plan was to build two of these things – one as a prototype and a second cleaner, better version as the actual gift. So I ordered the parts I’d need twice and started designing in Fusion 360.
At first I wanted to make on 100% myself and just used those of other people as a reference. Well, that didn’t really work out, since after printing it out I realized it A: didn’t work and B: was way too big.

   

This is what my first version looked like. After starting to print it out I ditched that and revised my plan. Here is the body printed out:

So from then on I decided that I’d take an existing model and modifiy it to my needs. I ended up using this model from thingiverse:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1258082

I remodeled the bottom plate of the box to suit my need and create a “hotplug” functionality with the power bank.

After assembling my first prototype of the top half and coding a basic switch function this happenend:

Sooooo I had to slightly adjust the code for it to work.

After putting together the a behaviour of the box I was happy with I printed a second batch of Parts and assembled it. The second version got a lot cleaner than the first one. I also glued in a little stretchable string to hold down the lid.

In the code I not only had a few “animations” it could randomly choose, but also a few idle “animations” when the switch doesn’t get pressed for some time.