This week, we ran into some problems with our BeagleBoard setup. Unfortunately, we found that we couldn't get OpenNI to work on the version of Ubuntu we had downloaded (Ubuntu version 11.10). We kept running into an error claiming that the "USB interface was not supported."

We tried a few alternatives at this point. First we installed Libfreenect, an open source set of drivers for the kinect. We found that Libfreenect worked where OpenNI would not; however, we soon found out that Libfreenect did not support the advanced skeleton tracking features we would need to get anywhere with our project.

At this point, we wiped the micro SD card which hosted our Beagleboard's operating system and installed a 10.10 distribution, but the Beagleboard would not boot with this distribution. As I write this post, we are installing a freshly patched version of Ubuntu 11.10; fingers crossed!

In the meantime, we're going to develop our skeleton tracking code for use on the Beagleboard on a laptop running Ubuntu 10.04.