I have to use kinect for an application. However, the final work must be mobile: it means no computer. Consequently, I thought using a microcontroller to handle data from kinect. But is it possible? My job is mesuring some points of a body (axis X, Y, Z) and get back these coordinates. I don't know if I'm enough accurate.
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$\begingroup$ Depending on the processing you need to do, I know there are many people using the kinect with microcontroller sized computers like the NVidia Jetson and one of the Odroid boards. I don't know much about them though but you might get lucky searching for "NVidia Jetson and Kinect" and find some good write ups. $\endgroup$– Airuno2LCommented Sep 15, 2014 at 12:38
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$\begingroup$ What do mean with "medical application" $\endgroup$– TobiasKCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 6:23
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$\begingroup$ I have to mesure some parts of the body in order to jauge the balance. $\endgroup$– YoannCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 7:31
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$\begingroup$ And how you can identify the important points? Do this points have specific color? $\endgroup$– TobiasKCommented Sep 16, 2014 at 11:04
2 Answers
There MCU which provide enough calculation power. I'd say "the bigger, the better". For example a ARM-CORTEX M4
This is enough with you just want to extract some coordinates
The protocol of the kinect is pretty simple (http://openkinect.org/wiki/Protocol_Documentation). You can easily implement a communication between the Kinect and the MCU
There are some microcontrollers which can act as a USB host, E.G. NXP LPC4357. However, microcontrollers tend to have very little RAM. The LPC4357 for example has only 136kB. If you use all of this to store an image, you'd only be able to store a resolution of 373x373 pixels! The USB host stack and other code are probably going to need quite a bit too.
My advice would be to use a small computer which can do the job, E.G. Raspberry Pi. These tend to have many megabytes of RAM, they run Linux and you can get drivers for them. They aren't big (compared to a Kinect), and fairly low power.