Quick followup:
Nothing conclusive yet. I only had time to try two Kinect 2 sensors with the laptop. This wasn't a full test, I literally just plugged two Kinect 2 sensors into the USB ports to see what would happen.
It was cool to see both devices appear in Recorder but I couldn't maintain a suitable frame rate with both sensors at the same time. I tried some obvious optimization tricks, like disabling video and trying different usb ports, but that didn't help. That's about as far as I got but there's still a few things I can try when I have more time to investigate.
TBH, I wasn't too optimistic that this would work with the laptop. My guess is that I need a separate USB 3 controller for the second sensor, which isn't going to happen with this laptop. It still might work but I think I'll have better luck with the desktop workstation, which does have a second USB controller.
My system specs in a nutshell:
The laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad P71 Xeon 32GB with Nvidia Quadro P4000. It's a beefy system and I hoped this would be powerful enough but maybe not for two Kinect 2 sensors. The USB controller is Intel and I believe there's more than 1 USB 3.0 controller but I haven't figured out how the ports are divided yet. Something I still need to play with.
The desktop computer is a home-built i7 Coffee Lake 6-Core 64GB with Nvidia GTX970. I think this computer has better chance of working with the dual Kinect 2 setup. I'm not sure what USB controller is on the motherboard but it's probably Intel. I have another non-Intel USB 3.0 controller in this computer, so I'm not sure how that will go. It worked with Kinect 2 when I had the old motherboard and processor in this box. I'll probably need to get a new one simply because it's a really, REALLY old card. TBD.
Both computers are running the latest Windows 10 Pro.
Tips for anybody trying this for the first time:
- As mentioned earlier, you need to install the UsbDK software first. This allows the Kinect 2 sensors to connect to iPi Recorder without using the Microsoft Kinect 2 SDK.
- If the MS Kinect 2 SDK is installed, you'll need to disable it from inside Recorder, and make sure the multi-Kinect driver is enabled. On my system, both were shown as Active after installing the update, and only one Kinect 2 window was visible in iPi Recorcer. After disabling the MS entry (just click on it,) both sensors became available in Recorder.
- Disable any devices that appear in the window that you're not using.
Hope this helps.
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