Blog List

Over the weekend I reached my 1 year anniversary of having my 6 KWh solar system installed at home so I thought it’d be nice to work out how much we’ve saved. In 12 months we generated 9044 KWh which is around 24 KWh / day which I thought was pretty good considering the number of very overcast and wet days we’ve had in the last 12 months. My best output this year was a day that we generated 43 KWh but it was the most perfect, blue, non-cloudy and not too hot day I’ve ever seen so I’m not expecting that to ever happen again.

We use about 12 KWh per day so it’s great that we’re generating about twice the power we need and it means the electricity company gets to send me a cheque at the end of each quarter. The first read they did after the solar was installed they came back a second time just to double check

So that’s the money side..but how much of the environment does that save? There weren’t too many Australian calculators so I’ll give the figures from two I found:

Carbon Neutral – which allows you to enter the number of KWh and the...

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I’ve been using the Microsoft Research SDK for Kinect for a little over a week in my spare hours, it is tonnes of fun and so much more stable then the previous frameworks I had been using. One thing that I think everyone will want to do is show a nice skeleton of up to two people being tracked by the Kinect.



I’ve created a Custom WPF Control ready for you to use or to style to your taste in Blend. It uses András Velvárt Bone Behaviour to create awesome little bones between the tracked joints.

So how do you use it? Step 1 – Add a reference to your WPF project to the following:

Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll – this is the core dll for using the Kinect SDK System.Windows.Interactivity.dll – this comes with Blend 4, you will want the .Net version (not silverlight) to allow the behaviours to work Coding4Fun.Kinect.Wpf.dll – the guys from channel9/Coding4Fun have a little helper, I use the scaleto method. SoulSolutions.Skeleton.dll – the custom control itself Step 2 – Open up your xaml page and reference the controls namespace

xmlns:s="clr-namespace:SoulSolutions.Kinect.Controls.Skeleton;assembly=SoulSolutions.Kinect.Controls.Skeleton"

Step 3 – Add an instance of the control to your page (or two)



Step 4 – Wireup the Kinect’s events to your skeleton(s)

in your code behind wire up the SkeletonData on the SkeletonFrameReady event (Full code sample at the end if this isn’t familiar)

private void NuiSkeletonFrameReady(object sender,...

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A month or so ago John entered a massive deep zoom mosaic – Mosaic of Queensland – into the Library Hack 2011 competition. He was invited to exhibit the entry at the announcement party on Friday held at The Edge. Rather than get the attendees to explore the 2.5 Gigapixel DeepZoom using a mouse he decided it’d be fun to hook it up to the Kinect and get them all actively navigating using their bodies.

He hooked up a bunch of poses using the Kinect SDK that would allow users to navigate up, down, left, right, zoom in, zoom out and a quick reset using a big range of motion. The skeletal points and joining lines are overlayed on the mosaic so the attendees could see what the Kinect thought they were doing. I made up a nice sign explaining what the poses were and what they did but everyone that had a go just walked straight past and went with trail and error instead.



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I wanted to put together a simple Windows Phone 7 application that I could put through the marketplace just so I can go through the process of getting an application submitted, approved and up on the marketplace. I decided to build an application “about us” so I used Nick and Dave’s Social Viewer Template to pull together our blog posts, twitter mentions, You Tube videos etc. into one application.

I used the latest released version and it was really simple to add the feeds that I wanted to show. As is the way when you’re graphically challenged, I think it took me longer to get the icons, backgrounds and splash screen images etc. how I wanted them. The thing that drove me nuts thinking I’d done something wrong was my Application Icon. For the life of me I couldn’t get my highlight colour to show up on it thinking we’d done something wrong with the output of the image only to find the hightlight colour doesn’t come through for this version.

If you want to check out the application, you can download it from HERE.



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I was playing with my first NuGet package install today as I tried out Jake’s Windows Phone MVC framework and hit my first error: Unable to find assembly references that are compatible with the target framework 'Silverlight,Version=v4.0,Profile=WindowsPhone'.

Turns out the package is built for the Mango bits (which uses SL4) while I’m still running the “original” bits (uses Silverlight 3 and a bit).

I’ll be in New York in July for the Imagine Cup 2011 Software Design finals and while we’re there we are fortunate to be able to present at some local user groups. We’ll be presenting on the newly released Microsoft Kinect SDK at the New York Alt.Net group. We’re pretty excited to be able to show off features in the SDK Beta that was released yesterday and looking forward to meeting some locals while we’re there.

 

 

 

The official blurb:

Kinecting The Dots – Developing with the Kinect SDK

The Microsoft Kinect holds the Guiness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever, selling 8 million units in the first 2 months.

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    I have been very fortunate again this year to be to be involved with Imagine Cup as one of many round judges for Game Design and have been selected as one of the finalist judges for Software Design.  I was involved last year in the Software Design finals, held in Poland in 2010, which was an awesome experience! The energy, enthusiasm and the actual solutions that were presented were overwhelming! Here you had finalist teams from over countries all over the world truly tackling some of the world’s biggest problems. Listening to the students presentations, motivations and how their software had actually changed people’s lives was really a touching experience. I’m really excited to see what the students come up with this year as well as checking out all the Game Design finalists!

I was excited to see the official Microsoft Kinect SDK released today! If you haven’t checked it out yet I recommend heading to the official site and giving it a go.

After I downloaded all the bits and did all the installs without issues I was keen to check out the skeletal tracking samples and that’s where I hit my first roadblock. I had two errors consistently across any projects needing to track my movements:

1. “Could not load file or assembly ‘INuiInstanceHelper.dll’ or one of it’s dependencies. The specified module could not be found.”

2. “The invocation of the constructor on type “xxxx” that matches the specified binding constraints threw and exception.’ Line number ‘2’ and line position ‘9’.”

Seems I wasn’t the only one when I checked the forums.

I checked that I had the dlls, that there were in my gac i.e

C:\Windows\system32>gacutil /l INuiInstanceHelper Microsoft (R) .NET Global Assembly Cache Utility.  Version 4.0.30319.1 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

The Global Assembly Cache contains the following assemblies:   INuiInstanceHelper, Version=1.0.0.10,...

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