Cin-D LOU laptop ready for webcam and kinect

General
1

Hey DaveB, Craig, Hodapp, and any other interested souls in our
DOocracy,

The (new to us) donated Cin-D LOU laptop from Steve now has a docking
station and power supply and is available and ready for bench testing
with the webcam and kinect hardware.

The goal is to load the framework software (?) and have the webcam
recognize (and track?) passing people and communicate command signals
to a driver board for the prototype CIn-D LOU head and eye motion R/C
servos. This is a parallel effort that is to merge with the motive
power effort.

We can also perhaps explore the Willow Garage ROS robot operating
system?

Bonus points to all if we can have something working for the July 21
open house party.

Jim

2

I’m back in town so I can help and bring the Kinect. I will take a look at the Willow Garage ROS, never used it. I might make it down to the space today but not sure yet.

Craig

3

I’m planning on being down at the Hive today around 1ish. I’ll bring the kinect and I have the CD to install the base OS and get the ROS up and running (hopefully)

4

The webcam is at my house and I’m in Baton Rouge till Tuesday. I have the kids Tuesday night so it is very unlikely I will make it to meeting. I can try to get it to Dave Meninger or Paul perhaps? They live relatively close…
-D

5

No worries I brought the kinect so we can just use that.

6

Laptop (Aka Cin-D LOU brain) update.

I currently have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed with the full desktop/development kit for Willow Garage ROS. This has development files for python, cpp and QT as well as all the hooks for ROS. The laptop is currently by the media station with the Kinect on top of it. Ros uses packages, nodes, titles etc to communicate to different pieces. Please read http://ros.org/wiki if you are interested in developing for Cin-D LOU. For now we are going to stick to nodes written in C++ or Python. The next step is to get a github repository and wiki page for the programming setup. ~/ros_workspace is setup to create your own test packages and you can use that area to go through the tutorials to learn how the ROS system works.

Also if anybody wants to make a Cin-D LOU logo that we can use to mark the laptop (both the outer part like a vinyl sticker and the wallpaper) that would be awesome.

Craig