Project Light Tether Pt1 - First World Problem Solving at its Finest
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,975 words · ~9 min read
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VR still has a lot of barriers to overcome cost and both the headset
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itself and the PC required to run it are factors here the fact that you look like
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a complete doof while you're flouncing
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about in the middle of your living room is another one and for that matter here
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we are in the VR space here at lonus Media Group you need a fair bit of space
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in order to even use it but I think more
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people could Overlook these restrictions if it wasn't for the clunky headsets and
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the bulky surprisingly heavy easy to
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tangle and movement restricting tethers
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that tie them to their PC well as most of you know I'm not an
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engineer so there's nothing I can really do about the headset itself but after a
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particularly vigorous round of hollow point the other day I was inspired to
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see if I could do something about the
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cable and once again our friends at
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Corning have come through so today will be trying at least trying anyway to
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replace the entire bulky tether with this durable thin and light optical
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cable cooler Masters masterc case maker 5 features their free form modular
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system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in
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the video description so first things first I got to gather up all the
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supplies I need for what I'm calling
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project light VR cable get it cuz it's
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Optical and it's not as heavy so it starts with that Corning optical cable
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that I mentioned before next we're going to need a gaming computer with support
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for Thunderbolt so while I know the g751
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from ASUS with its 980m graphics card is not technically VR ready this is a proof
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of con not my daily driver rig so this will do just
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nicely however because the HTC Vive and
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the Occulus Rift for that matter do not have Thunderbolt inputs we're actually
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going to need to split out our
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Thunderbolt cable into all the necessary connectors on the other end so for that
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I'll be using the Cal digigit TS2 or really I could use pretty much any
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Thunderbolt dock but what this baby's going to do is give us two usb3 super
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speed ports HDMI and audio exactly what
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we need also I guess there's another USB port there where's my power adapter for
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this
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thing nothing's ever simple it's always a journey toing Mount Doom when we want
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to make a video let's find a 5 amp 12vt
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DC power well I thought the power adapter might be here where I used to
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have that thing set up running to the server room it's not but I did discover
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that I already had one of these optical cables so coring sent me an extra one I
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guess forgot to move that 5V 4
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amp see I'm pretty sure it's
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like straight up non-compliant to not
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have the voltage of an input
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listed okay I found this kte 12vt 3 amp
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thing that fits which I'm hoping is enough because this would be overspeed
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to allow for a bunch of devices to be plugged into all the USB ports and
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everything but speaking of power if we're not going to power the Vive
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through the original tether one of those wires is a is a power cord and we're not
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going to power it through the Thunderbolt cable which we're not
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because optical cables do not carry power we're going to have to do
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something which leads us to the last ingredients of our setup a small
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backpack this was the smallest one we had lying around the office and I'm not
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buying a backpack for this and for some reason I thought I needed
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two so two battery Banks one of which
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actually has an AC power outlet okay so
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I lied that wasn't everything we needed but I found the things we need a short
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USB 3 a TOA cable a short HDMI cable and
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this is fun I remembered what the second power bank is for so that one's to
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hopefully go DC to DC to power the
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itself because it's got a
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12v something amps we're not quite sure
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uh max power input however both of our battery banks
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are dead so we're going to charge these
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up for the night and we'll get back at this tomorrow so we're back now when I
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originally conceived this project I actually thought I was going to have to
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cut off the tether and then resolder all the individual wires and like figure F
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out which ones were carrying which signals and whatever and all that but
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you know silly me I had no idea that the HTC
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Vive I mean you can see why it took me a little while to sort this out the HTC VI
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actually just has all the
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inputs as plugs up at the
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top there we go
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just like that so two USBS one of which
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I think has uh functionality TBD HDMI
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power and 3 and 1/2 mm so
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theoretically it's as simple as going from
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here oh wow okay theoretically uh we've
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already hit one stumbling block this doesn't physically
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fit
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um so theoretically it's as simple as going from here
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into our Thunderbolt
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Hub wow that is not a very long cable
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H so we've got another challenge as well
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between all the different adapters that come with our RAV Power extreme series
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Power Bank only one of them is even kind
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of close to fitting so we would either have to cut off and rece a compatible
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adapter or we'll have to rely on using
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the AC outlet one and a power squid or a
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power brick in order to power both the
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Vive as well as the Cal digit box
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meaning that our battery life will be somewhat more limited 3 and 1 12 mm
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audio cable should fit though at
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least oh it's a right angle connector
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nope even plugging my headphones in directly isn't going to work okay so
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it's back to the drawing board somewhat here hopefully this is one of those
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things where it gets Messier before it gets better let's go see if we can find
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a low profile HDMI cable
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oh never cut towards your fingers well
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I'll give mono price this their HDMI cables are tough obviously I tried to
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find a lower profile connector one first but failing that I well took the one we
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had and threw it in the vice about 10
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minutes of hacking away at it later and
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it's uglier but it fits wow that is a
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tight fit we might be back in Action here it was at that point that I
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realized we didn't have Thunderbolt drivers the updated NVIDIA drivers or
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the software for the HTC Vive installed so we took a short break while I got all
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the software up to date so we have a small problem if I'm
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plugged into the HDMI connection on the Cal digit box we're getting a compositor
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not available error in Steam VR but if I plug directly
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into the HDMI out on the computer we're good now there is still hope it's
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possible that we can use the Thunderbolt daisy chain Port here to run HDMI over
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DisplayPort into either directly into the headset or into the splitter box
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that's included with the Vive but I'm really not sure if that's going to work
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so stay tuned so we're going to try this
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again going from
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Thunderbolt to DVI to
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HDMI okay let's try
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again so just as a troubleshooting
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step I'm going to go back to the HDMI
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output right off the
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computer and into this box so let's make sure that it works if
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we do that so I've reached a very challenging
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point in the troubleshooting I have just tried to connect it the vanilla
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recommended way with the normal tether and running through the connector box
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and it's still not working but get this when I take a standalone HDM my cable
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and plug that directly into the computer
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oh whatever take my word for it the headset comes up and it starts working
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so I'm starting to think this might be a combination of issues where the
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Thunderbolt implementation yeah there see there it is ready where the Thunderbolt implementation of this
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laptop might use the onboard Graphics that is a very very likely situation
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and my box might be
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dead but as long as there is any potential for a problem to be solved by
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simply throwing more Hardware at it I'm still in the game so I went home I got a
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mini DisplayPort to HDMI I knew I had one of these turns out that's where it
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was I got a different Thunderbolt two
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dock I got the connector hub from my own
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Vive and just for good
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measure I brought my personal rig back
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to the office because this one I know
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for sure because there's a physical damn cable going from my GTX titanx to the
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Thunderbolt card this one runs off of
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the dedicated graphics let's
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go I suddenly remember
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why we moved to aluminum so it's update
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time the Box isn't dead and the Vive is
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running perfectly off of my
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machine now let's try going back to Thunderbolt see no
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okay wait a minute oh my God I don't
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have the Thunderbolt see I'm flustered
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now okay what's this interesting it says ready let's
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restart in direct mode wow wouldn't it be amazing if it
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was that simple I don't see anything
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though that was very abrupt yep we
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didn't know when we were shooting this video it was going to be a two-parter so
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does that thing have an
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Buton go ahead and shut that down you know what I'm just going to give it the
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old reboot just in case hey whoa whoa
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can you see what I see no I think we're in business