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There is a driver project established to run Kinect on Linux. See here: https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect

Will this work with an RPi? What are the constraints/obstacles likely to be?

I'm thinking this would be a real help for an ambitious robotics project, eg, setup an RPi as an onboard controller, with the Kinect as the "eyes" for object avoidance etc (or more).

Jon Egerton
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3 Answers3

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I have just installed this library successfully in Arch Linux. I can't see any reason why it wouldn't install in any distro. It's important to note that I do not have a Kinect, so I cannot verify that the library works, only that it compiles and installs successfully.

Here are the steps I took:

Install dependencies

These packages are dependencies of the Kinect Library or the build process, and thus need installing first:

  • cmake

  • git

  • libusb

  • freeglut

  • libxmu

  • libxi

You should be able to find these using your basic package manager.

Check out the repository

git clone git://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect.git
cd libfreenect && git pull origin

Build the source

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DPROJECT_INCLUDE_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/include -DLIB_SUFFIX="" .
make
sudo make install

Set the udev rules (so that the Kinect is detected when plugged in):

sudo install -Dm644 platform/linux/udev/51-kinect.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/51-kinect.rules
Trevor Rudolph
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Jivings
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It's possible...video

I doubt it will be very practical to see anything, but if you just used data collection/processing, it might work. Side note: the Kinect eats up a HUGE amount of RAM to run all the visual stuff. So you could run a pared back version. Good luck :)

CAP_Cadet
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Kinect works on Pi after some tweaks. Here is an example.

avra
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    No it doesn't work ... read the entire example: "Jon Macey 13 November 2012 01:31, As far as I know nobody has had any luck with video or depth, I'm considering getting the new 512M version of the pi and giving it another go but think it is unlikely y to work as the bottleneck seems to be in the USB drivers". – kevin Dec 01 '12 at 04:08