CakeRobot - A Gesture Driven Robot That Follows Your Hand Movements Using Arduino, C# and Kinect

The post describes a DIY robot that is controlled with Kinect hand movements and communicates with the robot over Bluetooth. It gives a quick build path, links to the GitHub code, and says the same setup could also use a phone as the controller.

Reading notes

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• The author built a simple robot over a few weekends after getting interested in hobby electronics again.
• The robot can be controlled using Kinect, and the post says the code may help others build one.
• If a Kinect is not available, the controller can be made with a phone, since Bluetooth is used between controller and robot.
• The build starts with learning Arduino or Netduino, and the example uses Arduino.
• The Arduino section points readers to the IDE, a tutorial, a board to buy, and the meaning of pins such as GND, 5V, analog, digital, PWM, and AREF.
• For Kinect, the post says to install Kinect SDK 1.7 and watch Microsoft how-to videos.
• Bluetooth protocols are listed as another area to learn.
• The parts list includes a Dagu Magician chassis, an Arduino board with motor driver, a Bluetooth shield, breadboards, jumper wires, a Bluetooth dongle for the computer, a distance sensor, a battery pack, resistors, more sensors, and basic tools.
• The author says some hours are needed to learn how to program each component.
• The Arduino driver uses pins D9 and D7 for the left motor, and D10 and D8 for the right motor.
• Motor direction is set with digitalWrite, and motor speed is set with analogWrite from 0 to 255.
• The Arduino code receives Bluetooth commands as strings, such as speedl and speedr.
• The controller code tracks the skeletal frame and uses the height of the hands relative to the hips to set direction and speed.
• If a hand drops below its hip, that motor is set to zero.
• If a hand rises above its hip, speed is calculated from the hand height difference and capped at 230.
• The post closes by pointing to the GitHub repository and inviting readers to fork and expand the project.