Like most hackers, Alex P knew a challenge when he saw one and couldn’t resist. He spent this last weekend playing around with Microsoft’s brand new Xbox Kinect camera and has successfully gotten it to work on a Windows 7 machine. This could be good news for MAKERs and DIYers everywhere—although it could raise Microsoft’s hackles.

“As a research project, I took a weekend challenge of getting this awesome new Xbox Kinect device to work on Windows,” writes Alex P. “Here are the first tests of controlling the Kinect NUI Motor and reading the Accelerometer data from a PC. Outlook looks good for other sensors (ie cameras and microphones) of the device.” He’s the same hacker who previously decoded the PS3Eye camera for use under Windows.

He has been posting proof-of-concept videos on NUI Group’s forums, but as of yet no code. When pressed if he’s going to take the newly upped Adafruit $2k bounty prize to produce open source drivers for the Kinect, however, he declined. He’s mentioned that he wants to integrate the drivers into Code Laboratories video suite CL Studio Live.

Microsoft recently shot back at Adafruit over their bounty, rumbling that they want to make any and all post-consumer mods or use of their Kinect device illegal—although that certainly hasn’t discouraged anyone, especially Alex P, from exploring the product that they bought anyway. In this particular arena, Microsoft has an extremely poor relationship with their customers, preferring to threaten, cajole, and bully rather than letting them investigate. While this isn’t on the order of an Xbox mod chip, we’ve seen the software giant’s behavior when it comes to people tinkering with their products.

What we can hope for, however, is that Alex P sees the light, releases some stable base of his code for public use (forever taking it out of Microsoft’s ability to tie it up with legal red tape) so that drivers can be written for other operating systems. Otherwise, the DIY community will just have to wait for someone else to revere engineer the camera before they get to play with it on anything but an Xbox.