I idly browsed through some Linux magazines in a newsagent, and saw an article on how to add vision to a Raspberry PI using a Kinect for an XBox360. There was also Python code for some analysis of the depth-mapped image. That seemed interesting, but I had no intention of buying the magazine (I forget which it was) because Linux magazines are over-expensive and I'd no intention of buying a Kinect just to try it out.
On the way home, however, I looked in the window of a "CeX" second-hand
I plugged it into my main computer and ran "xawtv" which is a good program for finding video devices, and it just worked, showing a video colour feed from the Kinect. Amazing.
I then Googled for how to get the depth-map when using Ubuntu 14.04, and the first link told me to install "freenect" from the Ubuntu repository, add "blacklist gspca_kinect" to "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf" to stop the standard video driver from grabbing the device, reboot, then run "freenect-glview". And it just worked showing the depth map and the standard video feed side by side. So it was up and running on my main computer in 10 minutes.
Now, being cheap, I'd rather not go back into town to buy a magazine for a short Python code listing. Anybody know of example Python code on the net that would run on a Pi for analysis of a Kinect depth map?