Hello all.

I've been having issues with dual Kinects on two separate computers. The first is my desktop with a modest quad core AMD cpu, good gpu, 4 gigs of ram, and a 7200 rpm caviar blue hdd. The second is a Lenovo W510 with an i7, 4gb of ram, QuadroFX 880M 1gb gpu. I'm relatively sure that the desktop has multiple USB controllers, I know I can get both kinects working on it at the same time. I'm positive the laptop has two controllers as one is USB 3.0 and the other is USB 2.0.

On both computers the case is the same, one Kinect looks fine, plug in two Kinects and there is some crazy artifacting. On the laptop it seems to be much worse. Also worth noting that I'm getting lots of additional yellow noise when I plug in both Kinects, not sure if this is normal. The screenshots below are from the laptop.

This is how it looks initially:


This is how it looks when it gets really bad:


I think it is worth noting that this is not my first time using iPi. I am also familiar with the 4 PS3 Eye camera setup. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Patrick

After more testing the cause of the weird corruption is still not clear. I keep returning to the idea that a sensor is bad, but that can't be the case because each sensor works fine on it's own. For now I'm going to try getting another USB controller for the desktop.

If anyone has any ideas about what could be going on here I'd really appreciate it.

Patrick

Are you using ordinary USB extension cables or active ones? I don't know if this is the effect of not have active USB cables so it's just a thought.

G.

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I bought these extension cables for the 4 camera PS Eye setup fully aware of the passive vs active issue. I can't find the packaging to confirm this, but I can't imagine I'd not get active cables. I have also done testing without any of the extensions and seen similar results.

Question, how much would something like a mouse and keyboard interfere with one of the Kinects? I have both a mouse and keyboard sharing a controller with one of the Kinects. While I have one PS2 port I could move a keyboard to, there's nothing that can be done about the mouse. I'm going to buy a new controller so I guess I'll see if that is part of the problem.

Do you know of a way to determine whether USB extension cables are active or passive?

Thanks for the response. :)
Patrick

Just thought I'd post a quick update. I still don't have the new USB controller, but I have figured out some things that were confusing me. I didn't realize that a lot of the noise I was getting was simply caused by the IR light from each of the Kinects interfering with one another. By playing with the angles I've been able to reduce some of the noise. The cameras randomly corrupting I still don't understand, but after seeing it occur in one of TrueBones videos, I'm less worried about it.

I was curious about one thing specifically though. When processing your calibration video, what is a/the normal amount of "Good Frames Count" that you guys get normally? This is found on the Calibration tab of Studio. I just tried to process a calibration video that was about 550 frames long and I got a "Good Frame Count" of 291. This seems a little low to me but I'm not sure what I should expect. From some of Greenlaw's posts I was anticipating getting 75% or greater "good frames", as he seems to see mostly green dots from what I remember.

I'm going to try some different surfaces for my plane tomorrow and see if I can get any better results than with the cardboard poster I'm currently using. Will report back then. Interested to hear if anyone has any input or suggestions.

Thanks,
Patrick

After receiving my new USB controller and trying it out, I am still having issues. The sensors in iPi are going bad more and more often, and I have no idea what is the cause. Interestingly I opened the properties of the USB controller from the device manager, and under the advanced tab it says the "Xbox NUI Camera" is using 469% of the available bandwidth. It does this even if only one sensor is plugged in to my new USB controller. This is on my desktop with XP Pro 64 bit.

It's worth noting that I'm also trying to get a single sensor working on an i7 Dell with Windows 7 64 bit, and while it does not happen nearly as often the sensor still goes corrupt sometimes.

Please, if somebody could give me a clue as to what might be going on here I'd really appreciate it. I'm about to pull my hair out here.

Thanks,
Patrick