Revision history [back]

I managed to get a Kinect working about a year ago on a Pandaboard, however I must warn you that the Pandaboard is not really powerful enough to read out the Kinect at the full framerate and do processing on the side (include encoding and sending it over a network).

My idea was to have the Pandaboard send images over Wifi to a laptop with more computational power which would do the processing. I tried many variations of encoding and resizing to get the highest possible framerate, but I could not get more than 20 fps. After a while (few minutes) the cpu would get too hot and shift down, dropping the framerate to somewhere around 10 fps. If you do the processing on the pandaboard you do not need to encode it and send it, so you might get somewhat higher framerate then, but then you are limited to the computational power of the Pandaboard.

However if you still want to get it to work, here is roughly what I did:

• Download the source code for OpenNI
• Compile the source code with the arm flag set (follow the instructions at OpenNI somewhere, I am not sure what I had to do)
• Disable kernel modules for kinect if necessary (I believe they are called gspca_kinect, google it ;) )
• I received some error that it couldn't connect to the Kinect, I had to activate USB BULK type in the OpenNI config
• I didn't use any ros package for reading out the Kinect, I created my own package that in my opinion is more efficient and customizable than the ros one, so I am afraid I cannot help you much there. If you want I can give you a link to the code I used.

I hope this is of any help.