SteamVR - problems I've encountered & solutions.

[soulburner]

I've been setting up SteamVR to 3 different PCs for the last week and always got different problems. I spent hours and hours googling and trying to solve problems. So, I decided to sum up all of them and put them here. In case it can be useful for others.

One controller shows orange light (doesn't connect)

I was pretty surprised that it happened to me just out of the box.

The solution was quite simple - connect both controllers with micro USB cable and upgrade the firmware.

Everything seems to work in the software, but headset doesn't show a picture. Just a pure black.

Everything worked fine, but then just stopped. The software doesn't show any errors. The "picture mirroring" works fine and the headset tracks the position.

Solution: Change the HDMI cable. The one came with HTC Vive stopped working after 2-3 hours and never worked again. I was "lucky" and the problem was in a PC-to-linkbox HDMI cable. But somebody encounters the cable failure in the long cable to the headset. You can check if it is your case by opening the small tray on the headset (where cables come in and the top strap is held). You can push it forward and then disconnect the cable from the headset screen and try to replace it with your own.

You get a HDMI connection error in SteamVR after a while. Or it just appears/disappears.

The HDMI cable can work fine with the monitor but doesn't work with Vive linkbox.

Solution: my PC case prevented the HDMI cable from fitting tight into the GPU board. So I had to cut some isolation with a knife to make it fit.

One base station (IR camera/lighthouse) doesn't work/track.

Solution: Check if both base station positioned correctly (the direction does matter!). You can't put the on the side. The channel letter on the camera should be in the correct position.

SteamVR can track a headset. But if you power on the controllers, it loses the headset. Or some of your controllers blink green (not tracking) in the software. Or it tracks only one controller and the other controller and a headset blinks green.

That was the tough one. My friend and I spent hours re-installing the software, checking drivers, etc.
Solution: Try a different USB port! Yeah, on the PC of my friend SteamVR didn't want to work in USB 3.0 port. It couldn't track all 3 devices at one time (headset + 2 controllers). We ended up with connecting the Vive to the USB 2.0.

Also, somebody on the Internet reported that Vive doesn't work with some motherboards and people are forced to buy an external PCI-E USB.

The main problem with this one is that it looks just like a problem with tracking. It tracks, loses, tracks again... This problem definitely doesn't look as a USB problem. But it is.