It’s a wubba lubba dub dub kinda day.

So far not much progress has been made linking the Kinect and NAO.

We were able to integrate the Java 4 Kinect libraries into the project and could pull up the camera via the Java based Kinect viewer.

One of my group mates, JMer, is going to be the Kinect person and has begun digging into the libraries to get the skeleton points data from the Kinect.

My other group mate, JWa, is creating a library of poses for the NAO to do based on the data received from the Kinect.

My job will be to link the two, calling the poses based on the data from the Kinect. For now I can’t do much since neither side is done. I was able to add our project to the GUI used to connect and load programs into the NAOs. It seems the NAOs don’t like the empty module though and kept shutting down so I put another module into it for now.

The biggest headache so far has been git. I made the first commit to our GitHub and since I hadn’t used git on a professional group project yet I wasn’t sure of all of git’s tools. 99% of my git use was init, add ., commit -m, and push.

When JMer tried pushing her changes (adding the J4K libraries) it started giving us a lot of merge and branch errors. We tried so many things. Started with the classic XKCD move, clone, and retry. We then determined that the errors were coming from the setting files generated by Eclipse. Mine were in the repository and were conflicting with JMer’s, in addition to about 4 unnecessary ones littered throughout the project from being worked on by multiple people for years.

An aside: the project/workspace file we were given is bloated with all kinds of unrelated (to our project and within itself) packages and code. It looks like this is the project the professor gives to anyone working on any kind of robit as there are packages for another robit called Hercules (it has sonar and some other stuff, I think it is for path finding) as well as various other robit type devices. Luckily the packages are all named intelligently so we can ignore anything without NAO in the package name.

So I go in and delete all the Eclipse files and folders, figure out how a .gitignore file works, and help JMer set up her identity on git (her first push had the name pulled from the computer and it was a weird one to say the least). Hopefully now we can go back to just using pull, add, commit, and push.

But of course I couldn’t just stop there. I wanted to sign my commits. This would involve a few steps because my key was hosted by Keybase.io (for which I have some invites if anyone is interested). I install GPG4Win and import my key pair and tell git my key id. For some reason GPG can’t find my keyring under /Users/Brady. I look into it and it’s because it’s being saved in a GPG folder in my roaming profile. I move things around and straiten everything out. I sign a commit and push it to GitHub. GitHub can’t verify because my school email isn’t in my key and that’s the email associated with this repo. I figure out how to add my email to the key, re-upload my key to GitHub, and everything is great.

Next up is figuring out settings for the portable version of bash that comes with my portable version of git for windows. I like keeping everything portable and on my USB drive because I can work on things anywhere, which is necessary because of the multiple computers I work on both at home and at the library.

This semester I’ll be working on a project to have a NAO robot (pictured below) to mirror a person’s movements via a Microsoft Kinect. 

So far we’ve been pouring over the NAO API. My professor already has a Java program written that connects to the NAO robots on the network and runs modules so we’re going to be using the Java for Kinect (J4K) SDK to handle the Kinect so we can take advantage of this. 

I’ll be updating more as we make progress with what I’ve learned.