In December of last year I heard that Microsoft was providing a Kinect sensor for use in the FIRST Robotics Competition’s “Kit of Parts”. For those of you who are not familiar with this competition, it is an annual event for high school students to build a robot capable of solving a problem which varies from year to year. Back in 2008, I volunteered as a judge in a FIRST Tech Challenge and I never forgot the experience of seeing so many young people so excited about an engineering and scientific event. As an inveterate software engineer and amateur robot researcher who uses many different Microsoft technologies, I decided to investigate the Kinect sensor and the SDK Microsoft provided to exploit its capabilities. My thought was that I might learn something myself, while creating an example of how to use the SDK for the basic function of determining the angle between body segments of the person being tracked by the Kinect sensor. Since the Kinect sensor is designed to perform “skeletal tracking,” this is well ...

Read the rest of entry »

Two full days of technical sessions at the SoCal code camp at Cal State Fullerton on Jan. 28 and 29.

Read the rest of entry »

Doug Boling will deliver a webcast to talk about Integrating Gestures in Windows Embedded Compact on Jan. 10th, 2012 @ 9:00 AM (PST)

Read the rest of entry »

In recent years, with a large number of open-source software packages released to the market, many companies have been jumping onto the bandwagon and hoping to find free software solution.  Let’s look little deeper into different issues associated with using open-source software for a commercial product.

Read the rest of entry »

Doug Boling will be presenting a webcast to talk about porting Windows CE 6.0 BSP to Compact 7 on Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 @ 9:00AM Pacific Time.

Read the rest of entry »

After some setbacks the book is here http://www.apress.com/9781430241799

         In this blog we are going to see how to make a webcam work on Wince7, I chose this topic to be my first blog because when I was trying to do that I didn’t find anything helpful on the internet and I realized that many others were facing the same problem, it took me some time to come to the wright solution and I would like to share it with you in some simple steps: what you will need? 1-eBox3310A_MSJK getting started pdf (containing the steps of creating OS image) (here) 2-the camera driver(webcam driver) (here) 3-Logitech pro 5000 webcam (as the driver is written for it) ok now we are ready, let’s get started: 1-extract the cam driver in this directory (C:\WINCE700\public\ThirdParty\Catalog),here I am supposing that your wince7 directory is c:\wince700 2-open the webcam.bib in (C:\WINCE700\public\ThirdParty\Catalog\Webcam) and modify the lines in it to .   MODULES   ;  Name            ...

Read the rest of entry »

Microsoft issued a press release that provides future product road map for the Windows Embedded family of products and talks about the future for Windows Embedded enabled intelligent devices…

Read the rest of entry »

If you access to access to the MS Mobile and Embedded Site (For OEMs) the first 2 Compact 7 updates are avilable:

Read the rest of entry »

Windows 8 installation.

Read the rest of entry »