so this month’s been a lot of vr. lighthouse 2.0 finally, my full body tracking is back, and i get to add more to my steamvr ecosystem experience, both the hardware and the software.
so, lighthouse 2 first. it was easy to replace the base stations themselves and i used the cables that came with the new ones instead of the existing ones because the amount of vive base station power plugs that have magically broken earth prongs is actually insane. (i have 2 of them myself!) i’d later thank myself for this when i rearranged the cables in my room and realised that the new ones are a lot longer. updating was a funny thing. for some reason versions of steamvr that are any newer than 1 year (some claim 2 but i bought my index controllers in late 2024 and they could update fine so not in my experience at least) are completely unable to update hardware. you press the update button, it says it’s closing applications, it closes itself and dies. you could downgrade steamvr using the betas tab at the time to get past that issue so i did (if you’re attempting this now though, you’ll soon realise valve have removed every option from there except from beta and previous. try going through these steps instead). the first one updated fine, as for the second one i think the link box was too far away because the update failed. the update dialog told me to power cycle the base station and so i did while thinking to myself that surely powering off a device that’s updating is dangerous. either way it updated fine after that.
with these new lighthouses i’m going to try power managing them in another way. i used to keep my old lighthouse 1s on all the time as many people have suggested over the years and i ended up with 2 of them failing on me. the power indicator would stay green but it would be clear that it’s not tracking, either through a load of tracking errors or steamvr just telling me that they couldn’t see each other. now instead i’ll be turning them on with the lighthouse power management app on android a few minutes before i go into vr and putting them to sleep mode at the same time that i go to sleep. i will update if/when one of them die.
now, the full body tracking. the 3.0 vive trackers went back on sale and so i bought 2 more of those. while setting them up i decided to take the watchman dongle i already had in my computer and put it into a usb 2 port, then plugged the new ones into my front panel usb 2.0 ports. somehow this fixed an issue i had when i was using my old original vive as a watchman where i’d have to reboot windows (sometimes multiple times) to get all the devices to show up. dunno why that fixed it but i’m not complaining. use usb 2 for your watchmans i suppose. the vive trackers seem a lot more capable of calibrating well and keeping that calibration too so i’m happy with that purchase.
and of course, as is expected at some point for anyone who opts into the steamvr hardware ecosystem, valve index component failure. for a lot of people the index controllers are the only good vr controllers we have and i do agree with the fact that they are so amazing (they’re the most comfortable controllers i’ve held) but god do they love randomly dying for no reason. i was laying down in vrchat the other night and suddenly i notice my thumb presence acting up. i open the controller tester and the thumbstick presence sensor is detecting touches that aren’t happening. at some point it just stops functioning and so i restart steamvr and that fixes it for a while. next day though and the thumbstick presence no longer functions. as well as that i’ve noticed that vibrations are now louder on my left controller than my right. thankfully though so far that’s all it is. i’m not gonna bother messaging steam support unless something worse happens to them.
edits
(2025-10-07: i wrote “an” instead of “a” somewhere, well done me)