Vive Base Station Error

[SubmergedCookie]

Hello, 

Both of my base stations have blinking RED LED's and, using Steam VR and to the best of my knowledge, they are both giving 10010 errors. I believe this error means that an IR sensor is not firing off correctly in both units. I have minor playability with the base station combo, but tracking will randomly be lost and my controllers or headset will move to the floor in-game and stay there until tracking is picked up again 2-20 seconds later.

This all started happening back in February, two months out of my warranty, unfortunately. They have always been on a stand and both on a surge protector and have never fallen over, so I don't know how the problem developed.

I am unsure of how to proceed from here, any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[HackPerception]

@SubmergedCookie - Basestations are high precision mechanical devices which offer higher fidelity tracking via their mechanical design. The 1.0 basestations have two motors and each of them spins at 3600RPM which is over 200,000 revs per hour per rotor - eventually they simply start to wear out. There's no reliable user fix for this - they're specialized devices and repair requires re-calibration using specialized equipment. You can reach out to our Live chat to specifically check warranty status on your unit, you can try to replace the units through them (which varies by country), you can purchase replacement stations, or you can look towards a current gen replacement. It's a tricky situation - the newer 2.0 stations are also mechanical and have the same fundamental Pros and Cons.

The best way to ensure the longest lifespan of the units is to use basestation power management to turn the stations off automatically when not in use or to manually unplug them. Moving a basestation while it's spinning will reduce it's lifespan and potentially break the station if the movement is violent enough.

In your case, it sounds like your stations maybe have one functional rotor a piece which is can pull some tracking data but not enough to sustain a session.

[GreenDragon]

Why is the base station power management not turned on by DEFAULT.   Geez   Mine had to die before I found that hidden feature.  

[HackPerception]

@GreenDragon - This is a Valve/SteamVR decision that's likely based on several factors. First, you have to have a specific Bluetooth driver installed, second - you have to specifically opt-in to enable bluetooth communication for security as it's something that's exploitable and many developers and enterprise users need it disabled, and lastly, bluetooth power management can wreak havoc on multi-HMD setups and arcades and needs to be disabled. BT power management historically has mixed reception - while it addresses one problem, it can bring up a host of other undesirable behaviors.

This is embedded and managed within SteamVR and the SteamVR Tracking tech statck - it's not something HTC can directly affect as that's managed by Valve.