Vive wireless adapter disconnects after a few minutes.

[MB Geek]

14 minutes ago, It'sToast said:

I have made a discovery that may correct many peoples problems.

I'll put it simply, turn off ALL lighting on the room, ALL LED's and florescent lighting, im talking pitch black room, mouse/keyboard basically anything that emits light, shut it off or block it. Yes, that includes the ceiling lights, clock light, router light.. everything.

Hey, I'm up for trying anything at this point ... if you told me I have to sacrifice a chicken I'd deal with the stain on my carpet LOL.  I'll follow up when I can.  Using the link box has helped but not entirely fixed the issue.

[Galatoni]

16 hours ago, MB Geek said:

At this point the only thing that would work is a class action lawsuit ... they are selling a $300~$360 product with a widespread and known issue and do nothing about it.  Just in this thread alone is enough to show that it's not any one PC setup or incompatibility, but inherent in their hardware.  Anyone know where to start one?

I'm not sure on the process, but i'm also not sure how many different countries or even how much it would cost.

No update on the status of the device I sent in, like, they've not even said they've received it. So i'm curious to know if that ever turns up again.

[Galatoni]

Lights don't operate on the same wavelength as the wigig beam that's used. That said, material a little thicker than thin cardboard will block the signal. I certainly wouldn't expect house-hold lights to impact it. That said, I originally thought it wouldn't be a heat-related problem and it turns out that the logs say it is.

Btw - that is the Wireless adapter logs, not the steamVR ones.

[tfmjonny]

Interesting development I've found, if I could get other ppl to test too and verify their experiences. Preface this with, my dropouts are confirmed to not be caused by temp issues, I have a fan mounted to my adapter that keeps it cool.

I forced my motherboard bios to PCIe Gen 3 and also ran the PCIeGenConfig.exe program in the wireless application folder and set the toggle to "Disable"

Played all night, and while I was still getting short 1 second video dropouts once in a while but very sparingly, I didn't experience any crashes. I checked the Wireless App logs as well after every video dropout and normally either it will log a massive signal drop or a loss of the usb node. There were zero errors in my log tonight.

I might be onto something, my theory is there could be some weird conflict running a Gen 3 card (my video card) and a Gen 2 card (Intel WiGig) on the same MoBo without forcing that setting to either Gen 2 or 3. It was originally set to Auto and who knows what the Bios was doing in that state. Reading up, the card will run in a Gen 3 state but still only give data throughput of Gen 2.

Again, not sure if this is actually the issue but I did notice tangible and measurable improvement in both performance and the logs. Try this out and see what you experience.

[Galatoni]

Interesting indeed. I'd love to test, and once I get my adapter back from HTC i'll take a look. But I feel that we shouldn't be doing this research ourselves. We should have been informed by HTC and their tech dudes, or indeed had something passed out to us to do this. It's pretty bad that we're having to do all this leg-work ourselves, and many of us won't be able to do this anyway. It's fairly technical afterall.

[arknes]

with my vive pro and cooler fan mod on the wireless unit I have not crashed or video dropouts, black/gray screen in the last 8 hrs of playing  on 1.20190410.   @ tfmjonny I will test this out on my 2nd pc and give a update later tonight

[Galatoni]

I appreciate the input. I can see that it could be a cooling problem, but I can imagine for the majority of people they're not going to be performing any kind of modification to their units. Simple reason being, we shouldn't have to. Even if after market retrofitting is required, it's not us that should be doing it - it should be HTC.

I've had confirmation that my adapter has reached their centre in Romania, now to see if they actually open the boxes this time.

Edited March 4, 2020 by Galatoni

[arknes]

ya now time to wait 2 to 3 weeks to get it back , I hate sneding them my selff had a base station brick on me toon them 90 days to get it back to me , had to send in my head set 1 time 1st gen took them 73 days to get it back to me....just sad

[Galatoni]

OK. So it's been just under a week. And some work has been done ("WiGig signal connection abnormal"):

An RF Module (https://pdaspare.ru/catalogue/vive/wireless-adapter/54h20659-00m)
The void label

So they've opened it up and they appeared to have made a replacement to the RF module. So now just to wait and see what happens when I test it 🙂

[tfmjonny]

So just an update, it's been several days now and I have clocked 20+ hours on VR with these settings changed. I have not experienced a single crash, this marks a significant improvement for my unit. I'm not celebrating yet, but its starting to appear that it might be working.

I tried experimenting with the PCIeGenConfig.exe program and set it to "enable" yesterday and clocked about 6 hours of VR, that setting actually seemed to reduce the video dropouts more. Not sure if it was just luck and not even sure this program does anything as HTC has zero documentation on any of the helper programs in the wireless app folder but i'm willing to try anything at this point.

Before these modifications I was experiencing 5-6 video dropouts and 1-2 crashes every session. I have now gone down to 1-3 short one second video dropouts per session. This strongly leads me to believe that on certain MoBos, running mixed Generation PCIe cards on a Generation Auto Detect setting in the Bios could lead to destabilizing the WiGig link. So setting your Bios to force Gen 3 only could be fixing this issue somehow.

Also my Wireless App logs have still not logged a single error since this change. This leads me to one of two conclusions about the short dropouts I'm still getting. One, they are happening too quickly now to be logged or two, they are being caused by something else (eg. SteamVR's interaction with wireless). Either way, its in a tolerable state now and I'm starting to love my wireless again.

Hoping to hear from other ppls experiences soon.