Discussions

@gerdi: we have some ideas  

Hey gerdi, the issue with doing advanced classes is the topics start spreading out like a tree.  It is hard to say what topics we should cover since there are a TON of topics we could over.  Doing an intro series on CS is pretty straight forward, past that the water gets murky on what to cover next.

Ultimately, what topics would you like to see covered? Also there are a lot of good tutorials out there on the internet. 

My best bit of advice is to figure out a project you want to do and start working on it.  I know doing projects for myself made me into a much better programmer for multiple reasons. 

• I did projects that I wanted to be awesome.  This meant everything worked and wasn't hacked together. 
• The projects I did challenged myself into having to do research.  Now you can throw me at something totally new and chances are, I can get up and going pretty quick by poking around.
• It is more enjoyable.  You build something you want.
• Getting your hands dirty.  The more you see how others do stuff and making mistakes, the better you get at being a better programmer.  It is like riding a bike or driving a car, the more you do it...

@Zerutreck: it can detect up to 6 people at a time with 2 skeleton locks.  Knowning a set of data is a person is basically tracking.  You know those data points belong to that person.

6 people in the field of vision is a lot, believe it or not.  Back with beta 1 and testing out tracking, having 4 people in my office was tight.

Have you played with the SDK?

Hey Hui Hui, I'm assuming you're referring to the my computer controlled disco dance floor.  I used a single RGB LED per tile.  For my project, it was 64 tiles per board, i had 448 total LEDs.  You should also pay attention to things like the brightness and field of view of the LED.  Super bright but narrow field may not be optimal for you.

I have on my blog my real time thoughts on building it out over a few months along with a post on Coding4Fun.  With that said, I don't know if I'd do it the same anymore.  That was built before things like netduino and arduino existed.

so you're thinking 100% self controlled.  hmm, could do that in a few different ways.  Neat idea but from what i've seen is those things in real life, they have poor control but maybe they under inflated it or just were really crappy drivers.

hacking it would be pretty easy.  we've modified controllers before.

Hey kAh00t, a better place to get that question answered is over at the kinect sdk forums.  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/kinectsdknuiapi/threads

just thought of another issue possibly.  Visual basic support for OS 7.0 requires
Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher plus an additional download.  For OS 7.1 (Codenamed Mango) I believe VB support is fully included.

For Windows Phone 7, download links for everything are in:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Phone-7-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners/Installing-Visual-Studio-2010-Express-for-Windows-Phone.  

Mango beta tooling:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=77586864-ab15-40e1-bc38-713a95a56a05&displaylang=en

open up the solution file (SLN extention) or the project (vbproj extention for visual basic) for the assignment. 

For Day 1, Assignment 3 you could either open up HelloWorld.sln or HelloWorld.vbproj.

I'd suggest always using a solution file if it exists since a solution could have multiple projects in it.

From my perspective, they are totally different beasts.  Netduino / Fez boards which run NETMF would be a better comparison.  Those actually can use arduino shields too.

Gadgeteer to me is more like a LEGO mindstorm, you plug in the sensor and it just works.  You lose a degree of flexibility but you gain speed along with reduce complexity in the prototype environment.