While the cluster is now ready, we still need to do all the hardware parts before integrating everything. More specifically, we need to figure out how to capture video from the kinect, how to mount the kinect to the tv and how to make some space in the room.

This is the second out of 3 of this posts series:

• Part 1: Network Booting
• Part 2: Hardware Setup
• Part 3: K8s Deployment

Getting video from the Kinect

So, the first step is to connect the Kinect to our PC and get some output, ideally with a low-enough latency and in an easy-to-use form.

From the last years, I started to gain interest in another new hobby: dancing. Naturally, I would like to practice at home. The ideal environment would be a large empty room with a full size mirror on the wall, but I live in Paris so the rent is very expensive and thus I do not have this kind of space, actually I do not even have any free wall without any furniture where I could place a mirror.

Introduction

On march 2023, Valve announced with a youtube video: Counter-Strike 2, the sequel to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on a new engine: Source 2. The game was scheduled for global release at “summer 2023” and available as a beta program to a few selected players.

Unfortunately, I was not granted access to the beta, but it didn’t take long for the beta files to be leaked as a torrent.

Ambilight is a technology of Bias lighting used in Phillips TVs which illumitates the back of your tv with colors related to the image displayed. Their solution is expensive, but you can create your own solution using an ESP 8266 controller and some cheap led strips.

In order to adapt the lights to the image, the ambilight system needs to capture the images displayed on your tv. There are 2 main ways to do that: you can use a physical box to capture the video using an HDMI splitter and an acquisition card between your devices (Mi Box, Nvidia Shield, Xbox …) and your TV or you can use a software solution to directly stream the video from a device (PC, Android TV …).

A few months ago, I started to search for some upscaling software to integrate into Zogwine, my media center with the goal of upscaling some of my old animes either on the fly or via some kind of preprocessing. I found quite a lot of projects on github, and especially the Video2X project which gathered many different projects and versions. So I decided to do a quick benchmark to decide which one to use. I would also recommend you to read this excellent article from crunchyroll’s tech blog where they did their own tests for upscaling.

When I started to tinker with home automation and electronics a few years ago, it was common to use arduino cards to create DIY connected devices. You would then communicate with a central server to send and receive information. The communications were usually done using usb, ethernet (using an ethernet shield) or radio (2.4Ghz or 433Mhz) with projects like MySensors.

Most of the time these cards were programmed using the “Arduino language” which is quite close to C++. I kept this habit when I switched to use the esp8266/esp32 cards but in the meantime, awesome projects were developped to facilitate the development of this kind of devices, especially dedicated ecosystems like ESP-Easy, Tasmota and ESP Home, which is the project that I decided to use.