SteamVR should have told me my lighthouse was broken a week ago instead of being 'green'.

[TravelTrousers]

Recently my Vive started not tracking as reliably as it did, I would get grey screens and missing controllers. I have a large play area so figured this was due to the 6.4m distance between the lighthouses. Bear it mind it hasn't been a problem until recently.

I would usually play room scale games but I've recently been developing something in Unity so have spent time sitting at my desk. One lighthouse is right in front of me, about a meter away, but I was finding that unless I turned my head so the rear lighthouse was hitting the HMD the tracking was not working. In SteamVR everything was good and green but obviously something was wrong. So I :
moved the base stations closer together : same issue
put up curtains to stop possible reflections from the large windows I have : same issue
Attached the sync cable : same issue
switched to A/B channels (from B/C) : same issue
recalibrated room scale : same issue
rebooted : same issue

One other change was that the bad lighthouse now appeared to be much higher than it was. I could still see it in the menu room, but it was now in the wrong position.

Everything was still green in SteamVR while standing in the center of the room.

Finally I looked at the emitters with my phone camera and found the issue. The vertical IR emitter is no longer working. I started the RMA and am pretty annoyed to find they're going to take up to three weeks to fix it...

However, my issue really is why I had to figure this out by myself. Surely SteamVR knew that one lighthouse station wasn't emitting vertical pulses, it should have given me an error right after it stopped working properly. Instead I have had an annoying couple of weeks wondering why my Vive suddenly became unreliable...

[Bsolomon]

I really hope this isn't my issue. Mine worked for a week an now it's not working and drops headset after a minute after a number of issues.

[caidicus]

Originally posted by Bsolomon:

I really hope this isn't my issue. Mine worked for a week an now it's not working and drops headset after a minute after a number of issues.

Did you by chance turn on the headset camera? After turning on the camera, one of my base stations kept losing tracking.

Turns out, not all USB ports can handle the increased bandwidth.

Either way, if you have "Enable Camera" on in Steam VR settings, turn it off.

If you're still experiencing issues, try another USB 3 port on your computer.

[TravelTrousers]

Originally posted by Bsolomon:

I really hope this isn't my issue. Mine worked for a week an now it's not working and drops headset after a minute after a number of issues.

Take a picture, if you don't see both rotating IR lights you have the same problem as me...

RMA time.