Openkinect with IR and CSIRO Cop Meeting

The IR sensor on the Kinect can now pull images illuminated by the laser. The camera needs to be initialized with a separate command to fall into IR mode, search is also on for higher resolution streams than 640x480. I have made some headway towards a v4l2 wrapper for the Kinect streams using AVLD. This involves capturing data using libfreenect and writing it to the pseudo-device created by avld.

This week I am also at the CSIRO Cop meeting at ANU in Canberra. There will be 1.5 days of chats and some informal follow-ons. This mostly a programming and data management community with a pile of Matlab, Unix scripters, web-service developers and database admins. The first talk was about eResearch and corporate infrastructure to support it. The second talk was from the legal section covering open source and open data, terms like encumberances, freedom to operate (FTO) and due diligence. This talk covered licences and caused a fair bit of discussion.

The third talk was about OffSiders, which feels like a new object based scripting language. It will require some experimenting to work out what it is good for.  The persistence is non-atomic and exists as a transaction as supported by the filesystem. It has a pure computer science glow and will definitely trigger some "what is like ?" buttons.

Python Bindings for Accidental API - and vivi.c

I started a couple of Kinect related projects. Firstly, writing linux kernel driver based on v4l2 and cloning vivi.c to act as a stub. The responses indicate that a gspca based approach might be better, but I had a lot of fun hand hacking the vivi.c code and adding 2 video devices from 1 driver. I will have to wait till someone puts some gspca stub code out.
Secondly, I completed a first working version (as in can get some image buffers) of the win32 python binding from Zephod's code. I followed the swig how-to's and had to resort to typemapping to extract the image and depth buffers, but it all worked out in the end. Not quite as well as I had expected on the 1st attempt but I can replicate some of the early work on Linux in windows now. The colour's in the RGB image are flipped, I will have to change the data order. A lot of frames are dropped so the response is not as smooth as it could be.