Coding – Page 3 – Tanner's Website

With an Arduino Ethernet, Processing, and a Kinect, I was able to easily create this little demo where hand movement can control a servo. This is just a tiny step in my master plan to create a robot clone so that I don’t have to leave my chair.

The following libraries and drivers made this work and also made it super easy for me to create it:

OpenKinect
Daniel Shiffman’s Processing Kinect Library (he knows his stuff and has great examples on his site)
Arduino Ethernet UDP send / receive string

Servo:
EMAX ES08A Servo

How it works:

The Arduino Ethernet acquires an IP address and waits for UDP packets on a certain port.
The machine with the Kinect sends packets to the Arduino that contain hand coordinate data.
The Arduino then takes this data (an integer) and maps the range from 0 to 180 degrees.
The mapped value is sent to the servo.

I don’t know if you can really call this a bug, but it’s certainly something that needs to be dealt with. After implementing the jQuery Nivo Slider plugin (which is great when it works), I was getting the following error in the JavaScript console in Chrome during every image transition:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'substr' of undefined

The transitions were working, but the previous image wasn’t ‘overlayed’ by the next image – it would just disappear and the new one would appear. It was almost like something else was there. Looking back at my ‘raw’ HTML code in the WordPress post, I had all three images in sequential order, but neatly aligned by pressing enter after each. What I didn’t know was that WordPress, even in HTML mode, was adding <br /> tags after I pressed enter, causing this problem.

Solution: Make the <img> tags back to back on the same line, thus removing the automatically generated <br /> tags.