Xbox 360 Kinect USB Extension

Out of the Box

Recently I was able to find my hands on one of the unusual Xbox Kinects. For those who don't know the Xbox Kinect is Microsoft's reply to the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation fade. It is essentially a camera that you mount above or below your TV and it senses your movements then translates them into movements in your video game. For instance, in a driving game you recall set your arms in front of you and pretend to drive a car. It works alright for the most share but it does remove a while to pick up spend to. However one plight that I have urge into with the Kinect is the method you connect the Kinect to your TV (No pun intended) .

Cable Troubles

The Xbox Kinect comes out of the box with a 9 foot cable. This is a petite scrape with the draw my Home Theater is place up. witness my home has the TV Mounted on the Wall and I have my Xbox elsewhere in a come by closet. This is grand further then 9 feet.

After looking around for a contrivance to extend the cable, most of what I was finding was the Microsoft branded extension cable that will race you about 50 dollars and it is only 10ft extension. detached not safe enough for my needs. So I started looking at USB extension cables. The Xbox Kinect, when you prefer it on its have, will approach with a USB converter cable that turns the special Kinect cable into a USB connection. So I started trying out a few different extension cables that I had available to me.

Active and Passive USB Extensions

I first tried out a standard 6 foot Passive USB extension. This did not work what so ever. The Kinect would not behold that it was even plugged into the Xbox. I then tried out an active extension cable. I obsolete a Sewell 16ft Active Extension cable (you can find them at various places but I accept this one to be the best deal)

After testing the Active extension cable it worked mountainous. After plugging it in, the Kinect fired good up and the Xbox recognized the Kinect instantly. The guys at Sewell say they have tested it with these 16ft cables while daisy chaining them all together and have said it works. They even have a YouTube showing how it works.

Bigger Does Not Always Mean Better...

I also was able to try a 33 foot active extension cable and it did not work. For some reason you can daisy chain the 16 foot extensions together but the 33 foot extensions do not work. Most likely it needs the active repeaters to be at those 16 foot intervals or it cant sustain the signal constant. So if you need to extend your Xbox Kinect grab yourself a couple USB Active Extension cables and you should be beautiful.

Note: acquire positive that you have the USB connection on your Kinect and not the special Xbox Kinect connection, if you have one of those and not a USB, then you will have to rob the converter or objective go for the expensive Microsoft cable

Also if you have a PlayStation go, these also connect via USB so you can spend the same cables for those as well. Sewell suppose has a video of testing them with the travel and it seems to have the same limitations, you have to utilize the 16ft extension cables and not the 33 ft extension cables