Update: be sure to read my followup blog post where I answer common questions about this hack.
Update 2: I've written a web interface to make it easy to set up a Kinect in a home automation system.
Update 3: The Kinect automation system is available for purchase by tech-savvy early adopters on the Nitrogen Logic web site.

As I mentioned in my original ASCII art Kinect hacks post, I have been integrating the Xbox Kinect camera into my home automation system.  That integration has finally reached the point where it's ready to demonstrate.

I've added color and dual views to kinradar.  Here are two videos of an experimental version with sweeping updates (in the sweep branch on github):

Update: a video for kinradar has been added below.

It seems all the cool kids are coming up with and sharing their Kinect hacks these days.  I decided I could join the fray by incorporating the Kinect into my home automation system, but first I'd need to understand the best way to process the depth data.

A little less than a month ago I was learning how to use libevent for a project of mine, but didn't find very many examples for my particular use case.  I decided to remedy the situation and polished and released my first libevent-based demo, called cliserver, on github, under a permissive 2-clause BSD license.  It accepts as many simultaneous connections as the system can handle and presents a very simple command-line interface to connecting clients.  The code in this example was then used as a starting point for upgrading my home automation project's network interface layer.

At the end of my previous never-seen-by-human-eyes blog post on converting a SheevaPlug to UBIFS, I mentioned that I would follow up with some recommended packages to install on your SheevaPlug.  Here's a brief list:

Update: as of October 2016, some or all of the plugcomputer.org links are broken. Use a search engine or web.archive.org to find the original content.

Although there are existing tutorials for upgrading a SheevaPlug to UBIFS, they require running a non-MTD/non-flash installation of Linux on the SheevaPlug, and none of them fully explain loading an UBI image from a USB flash drive.  I also wanted to upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) to Debian Squeeze.  I had to work around a few problems along the way, including bugs in Ubuntu's mtd-utils.  I didn't want to forget how I did all this, so here is exactly how I upgraded U-Boot, configured U-Boot's mtdparts, and converted my SheevaPlugs (yes, that's more than one SheevaPlug) to UBIFS, step by step.  I'm using PuTTY on Ubuntu 10.10 to access the SheevaPlug's USB-serial port, but other methods (like cu and screen) and distributions will work just as well.

If you've ever tried to upgrade the kernel on a SheevaPlug, you know that sometimes flashing from within Linux doesn't work, and will leave the plug in an unbootable state.  Here's how I recovered from a bad flash, using U-Boot to flash a kernel image stored on a USB drive.  In this case I'm flashing a custom-compiled 2.6.33.7 with the realtime patches (2.6.34 and newer seem to have problems with USB audio on the Sheeva).  This guide assumes you know how to get into U-Boot.  Help for most commands is available by typing help command.

Ever since I built my last desktop computer, I had problems with the Compiz-powered visual effects in Linux.  They mostly worked fine, but every effect would start with a few fluid frames, completely pause for a noticeable fraction, then complete the animation.  This was particularly distracting when switching virtual desktops with the cube plugin.  I think it all started with my then-new Athlon64 X2 6000 @ 3GHz.  I was (and still am) running dual Nvidia 8800GTs, I had plenty of RAM, but nothing would get rid of this stuttering problem.