Chaotic Moon’s Board of Awesomeness: Kinect Is Your Friend

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What's red, goes 32MPH, and is controlled by a wave of your hand? 

 

It's the Chaotic Moon Labs "Board of Awesomeness"!!

 

My good friend, Phil Wheat, works over there and he has been working on this most excellent device.  If you've been following CES, you've probably seen their Kinect controlled, powered longboard all over the place but some things you might not know about it is that it's all programmed in C# on Visual Studio 2010

 

The board is made up of a number of hardware components, but the main parts are the Kinect Beta 2 SDK and a Phidgets analog out board.  Visual Studio was the key to tying these systems together and making the project take weeks, not months to put together.  Even more awesome, is that with the Visual Studio debugger and refactoring tools, as tests showed improvements that could be made - changes could be made in the field, on the fly and tested without having to go back into the lab to rework the code.