

Ask HN: How was the Kinect hacked? - iantimothy

I've been seeing lots of cool videos on what people round the world has been doing with the Kinect hooked up to their PCs.<p>My understanding about the way 'hacked' is being used around here is that people have figured out how to hook up the Kinect to a PC and write software to utilize it.<p>My question is then, when you get a device like the Kinect, what's the process to hack it such that it can work with your PC?  How do you understand it enough such that you can write your own driver?
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calebkraft
Well, the biggest hurdle is being capable of writing a driver at all. Your
average joe isn't going to just "hack" this thing. These are people who are
already familiar with programming peripherals to be used with computers.

If you have that knowledge, there are several ways. 1\. Open it up, look what
hardware is used, find documentation for that specific hardware set on the
net. Write code to the specifications of the people who made the components.

2\. sniff the communication. This is what Adafruit did (see iantimothy's
post). Once they see that communication, they break it down to see what is
necessary to make things happen.

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iantimothy
I found one link.

[http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/09/kinect-hacking-
video...](http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/09/kinect-hacking-video-and-
data-dump/)

It talks about data dump. Anyone know of good resources to learn about
understanding this data.

