Last month, when Microsoft launched Kinect, an accessory that lets players control Xbox 360 games by moving their bodies, Limor Fried posted a challenge on her company’s blog. Adafruit Industries, which sells do-it-yourself electronics kits, would give $1,000 to the first person to unlock Kinect’s sophisticated motion sensors from the Xbox so that any tinkerer could repurpose the technology for such projects as building robots. In a week Adafruit had a winner, a Spanish engineer who got Kinect to work with his laptop just hours after it was released in Europe. “Now it’s unlocked for creativity,” Fried wrote.