OpenKinect / libfreenect

libfreenect

Ongoing Development and Maintenance by the OpenKinect Community

http://www.openkinect.org

• Original Code and Engineering: Hector Martin (marcan)

• Community Lead: Josh Blake (JoshB)

• Integration: Kyle Machulis (qDot)

Description

libfreenect is the core library for accessing the Microsoft Kinect USB camera. Currently, the library supports access to:

• RGB and Depth Images

• Motors

• Accelerometer

• LED

Audio is currently being worked on.

Information Resources

Information about the OpenKinect project can be found at

http://www.openkinect.org

For questions, support, and discussion, check out the google groups mailing list at

http://groups.google.com/group/openkinect

Or the IRC channel at

#openkinect on Freenode

Requirements

You’ll need

• libusb-1.0 >= 1.0.3

• Cmake >= 2.6

Outside of that, you may also want opengl and other things. See the platform specifics section for anything needed by your platform to run examples.

Basic Compiling Instructions

To use CMake:

• Make a directory somewhere. Like, say, build in your repo directory.

• Go into that directory

• Type cmake ..

• Watch the magic happen

• After this, just run make and you’ll be fine.

• If you want to use an IDE or whatever, well, you’ll figure it out.

Platform Specifics

OS X

You will need to pull the matching version of libusb for this patch. This is NOT v1.0.8, this is a change based off the repo head as of 2010-10-16. To get a tar.gz with the snapshot of the repo at this point, hit the link below.

http://git.libusb.org/?p=libusb.git;a=snapshot;h=7da756e09fd97efad2b35b5cee0e2b2550aac2cb;sf=tgz;js=1

Once you’ve gotten that tarball and unziped it somewhere, patch using the files in platform/osx/. Just go to the root directory of the libusb source and run

patch -p1 < [path_to_OpenKinectRepo]/platform/osx/libusb-osx-kinect.diff

Recompile libusb and put it wherever CMake will look (/usr/local/lib, /usr/lib, etc…). If you’re using a package manager like fink, macports, or homebrew, I’m going to expect you know what your doing and can deal with this. If not, see IRC channel.

OpenGL and GLUT come as prebuilt frameworks with OS X, so that should do it for requirements.

Linux

Should "just work" if you have the following packages installed:

• libusb-1.0-dev

If you want to see the glview example:

• freeglut3-dev (or whatever freeglut dev package your distro has)

• libxmu-dev

• libxi-dev

udev rules are available in the platform/linux directory so that you are not required to run as root.

Windows

This library does not work on windows currently. We’re trying to get something going ASAP though. Watch the mailing list for updates.

Licensing

The libfreenect project is covered under a dual Apache v2/GPL v2 license. The licensing criteria are listed below, as well as at the top of each source file in the repo.

This file is part of the OpenKinect Project. http://www.openkinect.org

Copyright (c) 2010 individual OpenKinect contributors. See the CONTRIB
file for details.

This code is licensed to you under the terms of the Apache License,
version 2.0, or, at your option, the terms of the GNU General Public
License, version 2.0. See the APACHE20 and GPL2 files for the text of
the licenses, or the following URLs:
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.txt

If you redistribute this file in source form, modified or unmodified,
you may:

- Leave this header intact and distribute it under the same terms,
  accompanying it with the APACHE20 and GPL2 files, or
- Delete the Apache 2.0 clause and accompany it with the GPL2 file, or
- Delete the GPL v2 clause and accompany it with the APACHE20 file

In all cases you must keep the copyright notice intact and include a
copy of the CONTRIB file.

Binary distributions must follow the binary distribution requirements
of either License.