Using the Proper Kinect USB Drivers

This picture has nothing to do with Kinect, but I took it after the End Of Year Ball and I quite like it…

I’ve been playing with the Microsoft Kinect SDK and I really like it. The speed with which it snaps on to people and tracks them is really impressive. However, I did have one bit of fun and games when I installed it. Like loads of other people I’ve been using other drivers with the hardware and although some of these have uninstall behaviours they don’t always get rid of the device drivers themselves. This can lead to problems when you try to install the “proper” drivers and the old ones load up and get in the way. So, to get rid of the Kinect drivers you can do this before you install the Microsoft Kinect SDK. First perform the uninstall on all the previous drivers. Now you need to get rid of anything left lying around:

Open up a new command prompt running in Admin mode. The best way to do this is to click the Start button, type CMD into the search box and then hold down CTRL+SHIFT and press Enter. If you get this right you will be rewarded with a User Account Control dialogue box warning you that you are about to do something vaguely dangerous. Click OK.

Now, in the command box give the command:

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

This sets an environment variable to tell Windows you want to see all the hardware devices, not just the ones that are active . If you type this command wrong you won’t see an error of any kind, but the process won’t work either. You can select and copy the above text into the paste buffer, then right click in the command window and paste it into the command prompt if you like. Now give the command:

devmgmt.msc

This starts the Device Manager. Now open the View menu and select “Show hidden devices”. This is actually quite fun, as now you will see every device that has ever been connected to your computer. If your machine is like mine there will be around 50 or so different Disk drives, one for every memory key that has been plugged in over the years. Look through the device tree for things with the word Kinect in the name, or the name of the package you are removed.  Look in the “Human Interface Devices”, “Sound, Video and Game Controllers” and “Universal Serial Bus controllers” parts. Anything you find that you want to get rid of you must right click and select Uninstall. If the dialog that appears has a checkbox marked “remove driver software files” then you should select this so that the driver files are no longer around to cause trouble.

Note that this could be vaguely dangerous, in that if you delete an important driver for your system you might find that it will stop working until you replace the driver file, but if you only remove things that are to do with Kinect you should be fine. One tip is to plug the Kinect sensor in before you remove the software and just note what appears in the Device Manager when you do this. These are the things that need to be removed.

Once you have removed all the drivers simply exit Device Manager and close the command prompt. The setting is forgotten, so if you want to remove other drivers later you have to do the whole thing again. This technique can also be useful for removing old USB drivers that are causing trouble.

Robot Fun at the University Transition Event

Making Robot Cowards with C#

Sometimes it helps to read the specification. I’d been asked to prepare a talk for a schools visit today. Six sessions in front of students from schools who were visiting the university to learn about the kind of things we do. I thought Oscar the robot and the Kinect SDK might hit the spot, so I made my slides, built some demos and turned up to give a talk to a bunch of interested Sixth Formers. Who were between 8 and 9 years old. Ooops.Turned out that this was a visit from youngsters looking at moving to the new Northern Academy which opens in 2012. If I’d taken the trouble to read up on the event I would have known all this. Oh well.

During the introductory talk I made some frantic changes to the slide deck and then off we went. Children at this age are about the toughest audience you can get. You either have them, or you haven’t. The good thing was that I had some nice props. I had a robot that you could control by touching your hand on you head. And this proved very popular. At the end of every talk we had a queue waiting for their turn to step in front of the Kinect Sensor and make Oscar the robot do a wheelie.

Who wants to have a go next?

It was really hard work, but enormous fun. All the kids were fantastic and a real credit to their schools. I got some great questions from the audience and everyone left happy, including me.

Two satisfied customers

Watching Oscar

Thanks to Moy Lanade for sorting everything out and Mike Park, University Photographer, for the pictures.

Flipboard

I’m not sure if Steve Balmer reads my blog (actually I’m pretty sure he doesn’t) but in the unlikely event that you are reading this Steve, would you please give Flipboard an enormous sum of money and ask them to make their program available on Windows Phone. And the Microsoft Tablet when that appears.

Flipboard takes a very simple idea (read social network feeds and use them to build a personalised magazine) and implements it in truly beautiful way. Your Twitter feed becomes a gateway onto a whole collection of interesting content. Simple tweets containing links are presented as pieces of editorial over multiple pages that you can flip through. If you have an iPad you must get this program. It is completely free and totally wonderful. And I want it on my Windows Phone.

Robot Fun at St. Bede’s

These folks were a great audience.

Went over to St. Bede’s school to do a talk today. I did one last year and it was great fun. This time I was showing off a .NET Micro Framework. We did some simple robot control and then I managed to get the Kinect sensor working with the robot. I’ve not had a lot of time to play with the SDK, but I did manage to get the robot to move forward when I put my right hand on my head. The Kinect SDK is really easy to use.

Four Storeys of Sugar

An M&M (previously know as a Treet if you are very old) is a small, candy covered chocolate sweet. Like a Smartie only smaller. In London they have a huge building completely devoted to this confection.  We went around it yesterday. Scary.

I think I just saw the one at the back move….

This is the M&M Mix Lab. I think they have a machine that can put all the purple ones in one box. The girl on the right is saying to herself “For this I went to drama school…..”

If you are in London and want to see how far you can take the marketing of a single kind of confectionary, then you should go and take a look.