Jellybean, the Kinect Drivable Lounge Chair

You saw it at Mix—in typical fashion, our mission was to build two Jellybean robots in three weeks for the Mix keynote; no pressure, right?—and now it’s time to introduce Project Jellybean on Coding4Fun. So, here it is—the Kinect drivable lounge chair! The lounge chair has Omni-directional wheels, eight batteries, two motor controllers, and a frame made of extruded aluminum.Jellybean exists as a proof-of-concept of what crazy things are possible when utilizing the Kinect for Windows SDK, and the project also leverages the Coding4Fun Kinect Toolkit in order to handle some of the more complex operations.Before we get into the code, let me point out, THIS WILL WORK WITHOUT THE ROBOT. There is an application setting called IsMotorEnabled, and with this setting set to false, you can play with the user interface and see how we did all our Kinect-enabled goodness. The screenshot at the bottom is of me testing this puppy at my desk without any of the motors or relays connected.OverviewThere are five total projects in the C# solution, and Jellybean is broken down into a four big parts:Hardware Robot Software Kinect Software User Interface HardwareA lot of the hardware is pretty straightforward and can be gleaned from the part list and the wiring diagram. Larry Larsen has a video of me building out the robot and explaining some of the hardware, both during the construction and at the actual event. WARNINGThe motors are extremely powerful—everything is very heavy and there is a lot of power in the batteries. Be careful. The wheels easily catch on shoelaces and headphone cords, etc.With other projects, such as the t-shirt cannon from last Mix, I had to disconnect a rather large number of wires, and so risked short-circuiting the entire project. Jellybean, however, is wired to make charging it a lot easier. The solution below allows me to charge the robot by flipping four heavy-duty switches to the off position. This wiring diagram is also included in the source cod...

Channel: Channel 9 Video Length: 0s Date Found: Thu, Jun 16 2011 5:05 PM Category: Technology Date Produced: Thu, Jun 16 2011 4:06 PM View Count: 0