
Integrating Leap Motion with Intel Edison - vpj
https://medium.com/@ramith/motion-sensing-with-intel-edison-41e3cbd4ac5f
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fapjacks
To be perfectly honest, and from the perspective of someone who pre-ordered a
Leap Motion on day one of their first demo video... This is about all the Leap
Motion is useful for. It's actually pretty terrible.

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dominotw
I threw mine out couple of months ago totally convinced that noone can ever
make it useful.

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duckman12
This article should be titled: Integrating a device with no purpose with a
Macbook and Intel Edison.

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aceperry
I was disappointed in how the leap motion was integrated with the Edison. The
article uses a computer to talk directly to the leap motion and has a program
send simple commands to the edison. You can do the same thing with an arduino
board, no need for an Edison. I was at a hackathon where both the Edison and
leap motion were available, but I couldn't figure out how to integrate the
edison with the leap motion easily, or within a weekend. Wish the leap motion
was a little more portable, especially for embedded systems like the Edison.
That could really drive the leap motion's popularity.

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fapjacks
One of the major problems with this is that whatever you're hooking the Leap
Motion up to will need to be pretty beefy, since the way the LM works is by
offloading the processing needed by the sensors [0]. The Leap Motion is in
such a small form factor precisely because it doesn't actually do very much on
the inside. All of the processing is done on the connected host. I have no
idea what the minimum requirements for that processing is, but I don't think a
RPi or Edison is going to cut it.

[0]: [http://blog.leapmotion.com/understanding-latency-
part-1/](http://blog.leapmotion.com/understanding-latency-part-1/)

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leapmotion_alex
Definitely -- being able to process 120+ frames of stereo image data, every
second, with near-imperceptible latency, involves a decent chunk of processing
power. That's why we recommend 2GHz at a minimum. The alternative would have
been for us to sacrifice one of three things -- speed, accuracy, or low cost.

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fapjacks
No. Nice try, but no, the latency is definitely perceptible. It really feels
like Leap Motion's management went for only one of the "speed, accuracy, or
low cost" you mention, and didn't really succeed at even that one goal.

Not to mention that it has no idea where your fingertips are during some
gestures when it works at all. It's comfortable to use the LM for about four
minutes, and then it's just a pain, combined with the enormous frustration of
trying to get the damned thing to work right. Plus also something that really
burned me personally: You guys really blew it with the deal with Best Buy. You
turned pre-orders into "we ship them seven days before everybody can buy them
at Best Buy". So I got my LM two days _after_ I could have bought one at Best
Buy. And supposedly pre-orders were ten dollars cheaper than buying one in the
store (woo!), but guess what? Shipping costs completely nullified that.

I back a ton of hardware projects on KS and Indiegogo, and you know what term
I use nowadays to denote a hardware project that's way behind schedule, and
mismanaged, and barely works if and when you finally get it? I'll give you one
guess.

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jgeorge
I was super excited when the Leap Motion was announced, and I jumped at the
preorder for one. That was however long ago it was, and it's been stored in
it's box since. It's very cool technology but I have yet to find a problem
that it's a workable solution for (sorry, Alex... I really want to like it.)

