Availablility of RealSense drivers for Windows 7

[S10L]

The RealSense devices are very promising sensors not only for PC and Tablet manufacturers. Most large companies that may also be interested in an integration of depth sensors into their products are still using Windows 7. Are their any indications available about a release (date) when Intel is going to provide official Windows 7 drivers for RealSense Cameras such as F200 and R200?

I was not able to successfully install the intel_rs_dcm_f200_1.2.14.24922 driver on Windows 7 machine. However, I get some data from the depth stream and the RGB stream but unfortunately I  am not able to get or change / tweak the camera properties to adjust to our demands.

[MartyG]

It is unlikely that there will ever be official RealSense drivers for Windows 7.  Intel purposely chose to make Windows 8.1 the minimum for the F200 camera so that its potential would not be held back by supporting older tech.  That decision was controversial at the time of release but seems to have been proven to be the right one now, as the camera is a very powerful device that can be pushed hard and still provide excellent performance under very heavy data processing from multiple tracking sources.

I know that is no comfort at all to Windows 7 users though and I sympathize a lot.  The desire for Win 7 drivers falls into the same category as people who want Linux and Mac drivers.  People are coming around to the idea that if they want support in the short term for those platforms then they or someone else will probably have to make their own unofficial drivers, similar to how Kinect 1 hobbyist developers made PC drivers for it before Microsoft eventually recognized the huge popularity of homebrew Kinect and supplied their own official drivers.

In the absence of open-source code for the drivers though, developers would probably have to use reverse engineering to make ones that worked the same as the official PC ones but used the developers' own unique code.

Intel are certainly not blind to the needs of developers who want to use RealSense without having to use Intel Core processors or Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 though.  Versions of the RealSense SDK for Android and the low-power Intel Atom Cherry Trail CPU (aimed at embeddable devices) are coming soon.for the R200 camera.