Other, Miscellaneous Tips

• POSTING: Problem with Jittery Capture---Windows 7 conserving power and turning off sensor
  A few interesting things I found
  - Installing in a place other than the default directory may mess it up (or I’m just missing a library import setting somewhere).
  - Windows 7 has some power saving features which may cause the drivers to fail within minutes of usage on some laptops. I have a Lenovo x200 and my RGB feed would quickly desynchronize/jitter and cause the drivers to crash immediately afterwards. To fix that I had to do the following
  1) Plug in the Kinect
  2) Open Device Manager
  3) Go through USB Root Hubs and look at Power tab for Kinect (labelled as “Generic USB Hub (3 ports)”)
  4) In the USB Root Hub’s Power Management tab, uncheck “Allow computer to turn off this device to save power”

• Microsoft SDK -- how it does skeleton tracking

• CONFLICT - you can not have Micrsoft SDK driver installed at same time as OpenNI driver

  Could there be driver conflicts between using the SDK or the open-source solution from OpenNI?  There's definitely some cool examples out there.  I had my Kinect (XBOX version) running relatively fine a few days ago, and have been playing with trying to install the latest OpenNI SDK tools to be able to try some stuff.

  I've failed to get OpenNI to work, and now it seems I can no longer get any of non-OpenNI stuff to work anymore.

  I wonder if the best bet is to setup a dual-boot and make sure to keep the OS and drivers are completely seperate: OS #1 (Windows 7 SP1 32-bit) has the OpenNI drivers (32-bit seems to be the preference for the OSS projects) and OS install #2 (Windows 7 SP1 64-bit) uses the MS SDK.

  SOLUTION 1: To be perfectly honest, that sounds like an enormous level of overkill to get your non-OpenNI stuff working again. I'd just uninstall and reinstall the drivers each time I wanted to switch between the two. But if you can't be bothered, why not try virtual box instead of dual booting? https://www.virtualbox.org/

   

  SOLUTION 2: I am facing a similar problem. I went the VMWare root and I have a windows 32 running only visual studio 2010 and Openni drivers. One of my friends told me I could using Norton to optimise my boot up and using I could disable the Kinect or Openni drivers from loading depending on which one to use. This would also require to reboot. I am still for using a virtual machine.

   

• DRIVER SELECTION - I have seen some postings on web where people have multiple drivers installed for Kinect (and want to switch between them) or get multiple installed (1 they did) when they plug in sensor and it installs a second driver by itself. Here seems to be the suggested solution. This is for Windows operating systems:
  
  • Open Device manager, right-click on “Microsoft Kinect\Microsoft Kinect Camera”, Update Driver, “Browse my computer…”, “Let me pick…” and choose the one you want to use.
  • What you see when Micrsoft SDK drivers installed:
    
  • Movie showing how to switch from Micrsoft driver to PrimeSense SensorKinect driver
  • (NOTE: both drivers already installed on system, if switch from say Microsoft to PrimeSense drivers then can use OpenNI/NITE software to develop/run programs. If want to use the Microsoft Kinect SDK then you must use the Microsoft Driver) --- I have tested this and you can have both on the computer --you just have to make the one you need the "active
    driver. VIDEO DEMO