Over a million people bought one of Microsoft’s Kinect game controllers in the 10 days after its US launch on 4 November. Most eager customers rushed home, plugged it into their Xbox console and began experiencing a whole new type of gaming – one in which keyboards, mice and multi-button control pads are no longer needed.
But a few of the purchasers had no plans to use it for its intended purpose. For months they had been drooling over the technology in the device, which includes a sophisticated depth-sensing camera and infrared scanner.
For these elite hackers, the Kinect’s release was a rare opportunity to take a piece of big-name consumer tech and see what it could really do. If the device could be made to work with any computer, radical new applications were sure to follow.
“The day it was announced we were like, ‘We’re going to reverse engineer this’,” says Kyle Machulis, a hacker based in Berkeley, California. “We just love doing this.”
What happened next took the hackers by surprise. Adafruit Industries, a New York-based producer of DIY electronics kits, announced on the day of the launch that it would give $1000 to the first person to get a Kinect running on Windows, or another operating system.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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Wow… you folks sure hit it out of the park on this one, PR-wise… for a $5K “investment” that’s a lot of eyeballs reading the name “Adafruit” (and in a positive context, too).
I guess I’m gonna’ have to get one one of these days to monkey around with…
Wow, great story – everyone is a winner… except AlexP, what a tool!
Wow… you folks sure hit it out of the park on this one, PR-wise… for a $5K “investment” that’s a lot of eyeballs reading the name “Adafruit” (and in a positive context, too).
I guess I’m gonna’ have to get one one of these days to monkey around with…
🙂