Hardware Hacking

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  • Cut off the head of the Kinect cable.
  • Do this as close to the head as possible.
  • Remove the plastic coating of the cable.
  • Do this by making a small snip down the side of the cable and pull back the coating.
  • Be careful not to cut any of the wires inside.
  • Next slide back the mesh shielding as shown.
  • Do not remove it as it will be replaced later on
  • Twist off the foil shielding and expose the wires which are inside.
  • You will now see several wires of different colours and some bundled wires inside a separate foil coating.
  • Remove the papery strands of material inside the wire as this is not needed.
  • You should be left with the something looking like the image on the right.
  • Next peel away the outer plastic and foil shielding from the smaller wires.
  • These wires are the USB 3 wires. The other ones are power or Kinect specific wires.
  • The USB3 wires you just unwrapped should have three wires inside, one unshielded and two shielded wires. The unshielded is the ground reference wires.
  • Strip about a centimetre of rubber coating from the end of each wire using wire strippers.
  • Be sure to leave all wires the same length otherwise it will be difficult to connect later on.
  • Twist the ends of each wire to make sure the connection which will be made later is smoother rather than being all frayed.
  • Move on to the power cable.
  • Remove the female end of the cable and expose the wires.
    • There should be two wires.
    • The exposed wire is the ground.
    • The insulated one is the positive.
  • Also snip the USB cable and complete the wire stripping and twisting as you did for the Kinect wire earlier on.
  • Next slide some heat proof coating onto all of the Kinect wires then connect all of the wires to the matching colour on the USB and power cables.
  • Note the brown wire connects to the coated power cable and the grey wire to the uncoated power cable.
  • Some good advice for connecting the cables together is to cross them over in an x shape then curl them around one another.
  • These pictures are for demonstration purpose, these wires should not match up in reality!
  • Solder the twisted wires together and then slide over the heat shrink coating and apply the side of the soldering iron in order to shrink.
  • Make sure there is no exposed metal remaining.
  • Finally recoat the wires which were originally packaged together and then recoat all of the wires with foil.
  • Use electrical tape to cover over all of the foil and to protect the wires.