Stokes' ProjBlog

I gotta gotta gotta gotta Kinect June 13, 2012

My Xbox 360 unceremoniously died one night, leaving the fate of New Vegas and the whole of the Mojave Wasteland hanging. My initial attempt at reflowing the solder, despite using the proper equipment, was an abject failure. Admittedly, I didn’t try as hard as I could have; I’d been coveting a Kinect for a while, and I finally had an excuse to get one cheap as part of an Xbox bundle. Say what you will about Microsoft, but the Kinect is a cool piece of hardware.

I didn’t originally intend to use it as a video game controller, but since it would take some time before I got it set up for hacking, I wanted to try it out. That required finding a place to put it that was high enough and — to work in my narrow living room — also as far back as possible. If this were the olden days, I’d have put it on top of the TV; here, in the future where TVs are thinner than they are tall, that isn’t an option. I’d have to get more creative.

I ended up building a stand attached to the TV’s VESA mount, made from yet more aluminum channel stock (salvaged from a 1970s-era map/chart storage system), scrap wood, and leftover server rack-mounting hardware. Even though it was a quick and dirty job, something imprecisely thrown together in less than an hour, little thumbscrews allow for some fine adjustment to level the shelf.

In the end, however, my efforts were for naught: even after rolling away my coffee table, my living room is just too narrow to use the Kinect with the game system. At least it provides a nice place to store it when I’m not hacking around with it.