Home Automation, Kinect, Netduino (and a Squirt Gun), oh my...

Today's Hardware Friday post comes to us from Dan Thyer (@LogicalDan) and takes us back to the Netduino and Kinect world (plus just looks kind of fun).

Home Automation with Netduino and Kinect

Home automation has been an interest of mine for a long time. There is a bunch of bad technology in the marketplace and the products are too expensive so I decided to build my own. I started out with the Arduino microcontroller which was really fun but the code quickly became hard to maintain because it was not object oriented. Additionally it could not do multithreading or real debugging with breakpoints and such. I refactored the code for C# and the .NET Micro Framework. I choose the netduino plus, http://www.netduino.com/netduinoplus/specs.htm, for the microcontroller which has a built in Ethernet adapter for network communication.

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Netduino Controlled Squirt Gun

The first project that I built was a servo controlled squirt gun for the pool. The code that I wrote for the netduino controls the servos to spray the gun in different patterns in the pool. I then built a Windows Phone 7 interface to aim the servos to the position on the screen where you touch. I used IIS live smooth streaming to stream video to the phone so you could remotely nail the kids in the pool from anywhere. I had mixed results with the video piece and at some point I need to spend more time perfecting and reducing the buffering time to make it more real time.

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Kinect

One of my colleagues in the office started doing projects with the Microsoft Kinect which has a rich SDK complete with drivers, APIs and plenty of good sample code. The Kinect has a bunch of sensors including a RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone. With a Kinect, you are the controller! I got the idea of using the Kinect for the controller of the squirt gun in the pool. You can now aim the gun by pointing to where you want it to shoot. The trigger is controlled by bending your other arm so that the hand is above the elbow joint. Plugging in the Kinect for the controller was really simple because of the rich Kinect API and because I had already written the back end tiers to communicate with the netduino microcontroller.

I don't know about you, but home automation is something I find very cool. Add that to the dream of an automated squirt gun (how fun does THAT look!) and all the other things Dan's showing off, there looks to be a number of cool things where his project can help us get started building. Now where did I put that breadboard...