I bought a kinect! One of my coworkers needed some parts 3D printed for his sched, so I helped him out and made 20$. I reinvested that money into my project and bought a kinect for the xbox360.
I had to get a power adapter from amazon for another 20$ and that enabled me to connect my kinect to my pc. It was really easy to get it working with windows, which allowed me to check its functionality.
IR, rgb camera, depth sensor, microphones, tilt motor and accelerometer all seem to be working correctly. It was even able to do some facial recognition and speach interpretation!
Then I moved onto ubuntu. I'm using the libfreenect drivers and the freenect_stack for ros kinetic. Following tutorials I was able to get it to work and output a 3d projection of my living room in rviz.
