Arduino and Xbox Kinect Robot

My good friend Patrick the robot is back! This time I have hooked him up to my computer via his Arduino and Johnny-Five (The nodeJS lib for Arduino serial communication). Then I’m using my old xbox kinect to track my movement so Patrick follows along.

How it works

1. I hook up the Arduino to my computer and use johnny-five, a NodeJS library that allows serial port communication to an Arduino in JS.

2. I downloaded the xbox kinect SDK, (I used v1.8 the latest at time if writing)

3. I downloaded a sample C# app that uses the Kinect SDK to track your hand and create mouse movements. I hijacked the mouse-coords and passed them on to my node app.

4. My first attempt was via REST api, then via TCP, finally I created a UDP server in node and UDP client in C# so that I could stream the kinect co-ords with no noticeable lag.

5. Email me if you are interested and I will post the C# project and node project.

Thank you DC Node-BOT conf for the excuse to play.

johnny-five node lib