A very simple design for ceiling-mounting a Kinect. No trepanning or duct tape needed.
I had an earlier design for mounting Kinects on the ceiling that relied on using duct tape to fasten the Kinect to an aluminum tube. Besides looking amateurish, the problem with that was the Kinect would wiggle inside the tape giving me an unreliable camera angle. Like the guy upstairs could drop a motorcycle helmet on the floor, and the Kinect would suddenly be a few degrees askew.
So what I wanted was to find some place on the plastic case where I could safely put a screw in. This screw would hold a bracket that fastened the little rig to the ceiling. Tonight, I took apart one of my Kinects to look for a good trepanning location–somewhere I could drill a hole to add a new screw without destroying parts or shorting the thing out. Taking apart a Kinect is actually not real easy to do, but this woman showed me how to do it. It occurred to me that the same screws I was taking out to open the case could hold my brackets. So there is a really simple, elegant design for ceiling mounting Kinects. You just remove two of the screws on the bottom surface (I used the ones that are covered by stickers) and put them back in with L-brackets between and possibly a washer. Easy-ish!
I’m seething with anger at Adobe Flash for causing me to waste several days of my dwindling time. I’ve been piddling with movie export formats to work around Adobe’s minefield of bugs and half-assed implementations. I’ve managed to cajole Flash into outputting frames to one PNG file at a time. It outputs about one frame every three seconds. This is just criminally slow. And while Flash is rendering like this, I can’t use it to work on the next scene. Grrr.