Here’s an interesting use of a data glove and Arduino with the Kinect to manipulate virtual objects. Sebastian fabricated the data glove by attaching a few resistors into the fabric. By touching the thumb with any of the other four fingers, different resistance values are obtained. This allows for a simple but effective recognition of [...]
I recently switched jobs and now work at Motorola Mobility as a Test Engineer for cloud-based services. In my new role, I work intimately with Motorola phones/devices such as the Droid Bionic, the Android OS, custom software that our software team develops on top of Android and a host of Web services on the cloud. [...]
With the Lynxmotion robot arm assembled as described in Part 2, the next step is to calibrate. Calibration is needed for precise movement so that when we tell the arm to go to a specific (x,y,z) position, the gripper lands on that spot within some small margin of error. My goal is to get within +/- [...]
Building the Arm While you can buy the complete kit from Lynxmotion, I ordered only the arm hardware (AL5D-NS), optional wrist rotate assembly (LPA-01) and the servo controller (SSC-32) from their store. I bought the servo motors from ServoCity as they had a much wider selection and lower prices. Assembling the arm was straightforward and required just basic tools: [...]
Finding Bobby In my quest to build a $1000 personal robot, I spent some time figuring how to build a functional yet affordable mechanical arm that can pick up small objects, play chess and do other useful stuff. Point #2: I want a design that can be reproduced by anyone with basic mechanical and programming [...]
For the past month or so, I stopped working on the Kinect to dabble on another project. “But you can’t do that! What could possibly be better than hacking Microsoft’s hottest gadget?” you may ask. Well I will tell you. All along I had planned to use the Kinect as part of a larger, more ambitious [...]
Following the suggestion by ChrisS in my previous blog, I tried to see if I can reduce the noise in Kinect depth map images by averaging data from multiple image frames. Just to be clear, we’re talking about the wavy appearance of what ought to be smooth surfaces of objects such as floors, walls, furniture [...]