Keepon Hacking and Kinect Control

Project Info

Title:

Keepon Hacking and Kinect Control

Summary:

Reverse engineering a MyKeepon bot and controlling it using the Microsoft Kinect

Year Started:

2011

Code Repo:

Repo @ Github

Tools Used

  • Microsoft Kinect
  • MyKeepon Robot
  • OpenKinect Driver
  • Keepoff Library

Videos

Press

Reverse engineered a MyKeepon robot toy. Tapped the i2c bus to map commands, then wrote an Arduino based firmware KeepOff to control the bot via USB.

Kinect control was a rapid prototyping project to make an interesting demo for the KeepOff MyKeepon Reverse Engineering project.

Uses:

  • Arduino + Keepoff - Control of Keepon Robot
  • Processing - tying the whole thing together
  • OSCP5 - talk to python script that’s controlling arduino, already had that written so didn’t write serial controls in Processing
  • GSVideo - for webcam (filming keepon)
  • SimpleOpenNI - kinect recording and skeleton tracking in processing
  • libfreenect - Cross platform kinect access
  • Processing running on Linux

The goth dance is a running joke from the Art and Code conference at CMU, held October 2011. For those not familiar with the youtube meme, see

BeatBots, the company behind the MyKeepon, took the KeepOff code and improved upon it to create the MyKeepon Library, which is now the standard library for Keepon control.

Videos

Kinect Keepon Control Demo @ Youtube: