Beta Testing | Kinect Testing

Beta Testing Kinect Report

As discussed earlier we had some issue with getting everything installed. But we manually uninstalled Kinect 2 SDK and installed Kinect Server 1.5. Went fairly easy enough.

From there we did a little code editing (change joystick type and converting to tank drive), set up a Kinect test area and went started cracking. It immediately worked. No debugging was necessary. Compared to last year (where Mum and I spent the greater part of a weekend battling though all kind of Kinect things) it was stunningly simple. Our experience from last year probably helped but to have something just work was still pretty awesome. Also, no noticeable (at least to our eye) lag.

With respect to the Smart Dashboard and the Kinect the 'Drive and Motors' Tab updated nicely for everything except for the joystick buttons. I would like to more testing of comparing Joystick button recognition for directly in the code (say a bunch of probes) and on the SmartDash. Somehow I must have forgotten to try that, but we will. I will note that the only one button did show up, but I think it was the "You are using the Kinect" button.

In case you were wondering, when we were running the Kinect this was the version numbers:
Driver Station: Kinect 01.07.12.00
DS 10.31.12.00 cRIO LabVIEW-2013_v44

In documentation 'BETA Getting Started with Microsoft Kinect for FRC', a troubleshooting section was added, which we think was a good idea. Under one of the bullets a symptom is listed with no 'try this list'. ("Symptom: The Kinect Server crashes or throws an exception."). Just a heads up.

We did some stress testing. When we plugged it initially and pulled up the Driver Station, Windows recognized the new device and then, as mentioned it drove fine. We left the code running on our test bot and then tried some things. We closed the driver station and dashboard and then re-opened them, the Kinect capabilities came back well. We then unplugged the Kinect USB from the computer and plugged it back in, again regaining Kinect capabilities quickly. We unplugged the Kinect's power, replugged in and everything worked well. So under stress, the Kinect reacted fairly well.
So we did try the Kinect with the Simulator. Spoiler: It didn't work. Attached is a picture set up. I'll look in to in more detail again, but I don't think the capability is there yet.