FreeTrack Forum

I was going for inexpensive, and little fuss out of the box.  Here is what I did.  Webcam was the Kinamax WCM-6LNV IR Nightvision camera ($15-20):




Hat clip ($9.95)  from NaturalPoint.  It came within  2 days:



The light sensor for the camera is on the top of the case.  Covered this with electrical tape.

Got a black cap and markered over the logo on it.

The camera came with a plastic lens cap.  I cut a hole in the middle of this and added a circle of floppy disk material for a visible light filter.  This was necessary so the camera only showed the IR reflections (nothing else from the room was visible).

Installed drivers, and set the camera for manual exposure, 320x240, with gamma gain and a few other settings.  This gave 3 points clearly visible in Free-track, impervious to any other light in the room.

The bad news, the driver for the camera is greedy (15% CPU of my older dual core rig) and is is unable (as of yet) to get 30HZ in Free-Track.  I can get 15-20HZ.  I have downloaded but not yet tried a newer driver from Kinamax.  Note that I have not confirmed the USB speed on this older computer, it might contribute to the problem, as the camera claims 30HZ at both 320X240 and 355X288.

Ran this into X-Plane and got tracking working fine with much profile fiddling.  I think the rig will be fine but it would need a little better IR night vision mode webcam and driver to really shine.  Its a little bit jittery for me in use, which I attribute to the sub 20HZ refresh rate. I have set the resolution a bit higher to perhaps compensate.

How did it work with the new drivers?
Thanks

Can't get over 15 hz with anything I do.  As a result it is jittery in the game.  I feel I need a better IR webcam for this approach to work enough to be useful, or some magic bullet for the driver problem.

Try Wii mote with an array of IR Leds to throw light on the reflective cap. Should work perfectly and with 100fps