Kinect Carbonizer still works

Carbonized Duck ready for printing

Around ten years ago I created one of my first ever GitHub repositories when I uploaded the code for my Kinect Carbonizer. You can find it here. Now that I have a 3D printer that can print things in colour (and at speed) I thought I’d revisit the project with a view to making some multi-coloured carbonized images. I installed the Kinect toolkit, plugged in my Kinect sensor, downloaded the repository, pointed Visual Studio 22 at it and it just compiled and ran.

Amazing.

I had one issue, where the USB on my Windows 10 machine refused to properly recognise the Kinect sensor. I’ve updated the GitHub page with the fix for this.

You can pick up Kinect 2 (not the the original Kinect 360) sensors really cheaply nowadays. You can’t plug them into your computer directly - you need an adapter and power supply - but you can pick them up on ebay at a good price too.

Bambu Studio lets you set the colour of each layer in a print so I should be able to make multi-coloured carbonized prints quite easily. Such fun.