TrackIR and eyewear

[Wiley]

The clip is fragile, in my experience I've left it as-is though.  The typical bad thing that happens to my clip is my headset wire gets hooked by the dog and dragged off the table onto the floor.  It detaches right at the mounting clip, but the plastic is flexible enough it's never broken for me.  I just put the little plastic fingers back inside and continue using it.

I had considered gluing it, but I'm nearly positive if I did it would break the plastic, requiring an ever growing ball of glue on the side of my head.

Had mine for about 6 years now, still going strong.

Wiley.

[The Fugitive]

I had actually considered building my own a while back, pre-my current PC. An alternate IR proggie called FreeTrack here: http://www.free-track.net/english/ . It even has a setup wizard for constructing the LED headset:  http://www.free-track.net/english/hardware/calcled/ .My old PC wouldn't handle the load of the camera in addition to the game so I blew it off. Not a problem with my current box tho. I remember finding lots of instructions on the forums on building your own IR clip with stronger steel or aluminum wire as a frame and a basic electronic circuit for a power supply that plugged into a USB port made from off the shelf Radio Shack parts. Will maybe look into that too as I'd heard the LED clip was ultra fragile. Or could buy the TrackIR clip and beef it up with wire say from a coat hangar. They have 1001 uses yaknow.

I built one and posted my thoughts here, http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,223422.msg2696856.html#msg2696856 I don't know if I have the pictures still. Will add them here if I find them

Found two of them, drawing of the rig...



and the rig it self....

[Bino]

Nice, Fugitive.  If you want to lighten it up a bit, you can use a "Joule Thief" circuit and a single 1.5-volt AA battery.  There's a post on the TrackIR forums about doing just that. Out of curiosity I soldered up a simple Joule Thief and with that got a single AA battery to light up a 12-volt filament bulb, so running 3 low-drain LEDs should be no problem.  I have the 5-volt USB power cord for my Track Clip Pro velcroed onto the signal cable for my wired headset, and that works fine for me.

[The Fugitive]

As I said in the tutorial I built it to see if I liked it because I didn't want to spend the cash on TrackIR only to find out it made me sick or I didn't like it It worked well enough for me to test both of those worries and decide that it was fun.

I now own the TrackIR system (and have for a year or so) and love it except for the issues I had with aiming. I'm sure there are a number of ways to make it lighter as well as smaller, but for testing mine worked great. I encourage anyone thinking about TrackIR to go ahead and make one.

[Drano]

I decided to build my own active IR setup. I snagged the parts from Radio Shack. Got 6 LEDs and a 5 pack of 15ohm resistors(I'll only need one). Gonna use one of my zillion old cell phone chargers for a power supply. They're  all 5v. Got a little circuit board and enclosure for it. Everything cost me $22. So enough stuff to make a cap and headset. The single pro track clip would be $40 shipped.

Will be jammed up at work the next couple of weeks so I  might not get to it right away. Will let ya know how it went.

[Triton28]

TrackIR 5 should be at my door Wednesday.   

Thanks again for this thread.  It reminded me I wanted TrackIR and made me $200 poorer.   

[Stellaris]

I wear glasses and have never had a problem with the track-clip.  Works perfectly.  Sometimes the sun will reflect off something behind me and cause a hotspot which causes problems, but that's just a matter of adjusting the blinds.

If you click on the camera settings, you will find you can adjust both the IR brightness and the filter threshold, which might help.

[Drano]

I wear glasses and have never had a problem with the track-clip.  Works perfectly.  Sometimes the sun will reflect off something behind me and cause a hotspot which causes problems, but that's just a matter of adjusting the blinds.

If you click on the camera settings, you will find you can adjust both the IR brightness and the filter threshold, which might help.

Don't know if I miscommunicated. I'm currently using the passive ball cap clip--whatever that's called. I've tested it by looking at the software in camera mode which shows what the IR camera sees. It's definitely my glasses. When the extra spot comes up, I tried messing with the settings to tune it out, but that didn't work. The only thing that made the other spot go away--was covering the offending lense (affected when looking slightly either right or left). Might have something to do with the prescription. The face of my lenses are almost flat, so to the camera it might as well be a mirror. The good thing is, because of that, it only affects things in a very narrow area--but it's annoying as hell. It's definitely that. Perhaps the face of your lenses are more convex and therefore scatter the reflection and that's why you don't have a problem. That'd be my guess.

Will be stuffing myself at the all you can eat overtime buffet at work for the next week or so. When I get a chance I'm gonna put together an active IR LED ball cap with LEDs built into it and go that route. Gonna be a fun little project.

[Stellaris]

Yeah, my apologies, I meant the ball-cap clip.  You're right though, it's the flatness.  My lenses do have curved fronts, so I did some testing with a flat transparent plastic surface, and the extra reflections were all over the camera.  It might also be a factor that my lenses have an anti-reflection coating for greater light transmission, but I don't know how far into IR that works - and most transparent materials are 90% or better reflective in the IR spectrum.

Track-clip (the powered one) for you!