Dear Chordata followers and collaborators, we have some awesome news to share with all of you: the day has come when we finally release the core of Chordata’s motion capture system. In this initial release, we’ll make our code repositories public so that anyone with a little bit of electronic and/or coding experience can go ahead an dive into the intricacies of our project. Those brave enough will also be able to download set up their own motion capture system by downloading the sources, and building the system from scratch. There’s at the moment no official documentation, but we’ll be happy to assist those adventure seekers that wish to take their chance at building Chordata with the materials at hand.

Be aware that this is an alpha release: we’ll keep on testing and improving the system in the next months (and we’ll obviously let you know about all of the improvements to come). One of the things that drives us when displaying the code is finally being able to expand our scope of collaborators, so feel free to write us through Hackaday discussion or with the form that you can find in our website.

That’s all fine and dandy, but there will be more to come. We’re preparing Chordata’s documentation so that anyone can access the core functionalities without the need of any sort of expertise. We’re also preparing a Tindie store in which you’ll be able to purchase our pre-built kits: this will enable people without knowledge of electronics to build and use Chordata so that they can apply its functionalities in their personal projects.

What this means is that we’re just beginning, as Chordata’s purpose is reaching both those who already work with electronics and the general public so that the worlds of visual art, game design, animation, movement computing, gait analysis, physical therapies, among others, can also benefit from the possibility of capturing motion in a more accessible and open system. We have no official release date, but we expect all of these additional releases to be done during the next semester.

Link to the sources repositories: https://gitlab.com/chordata

Or download the working files at: https://hackaday.io/project/27519-motion-capture-system-that-you-can-build-yourself#menu-files

Don’t hesitate to write us with all of your doubts (or simply to express your appreciation, as that’s what drives us further). We’re eager to see your reaction!