I’ve had an issue with a specific game on Windows 7, which is why I did a clean re-install of Windows 10 yesterday. Thus I’m now running a stock Windows 10 system. I downloaded PiToolSetup_84.exe from pimaxvr.com and installed it. However, the PiTool just simply won’t start. I can see the blue pi logo on my screen briefly and then nothing more happens. I can’t get the PiTool program to show up.
The VR headset shows a green LED all the time and a black screen.
SteamVR can’t detect the headset.
I can’t see the headset in device mananger, though I might just be missing it.
The same problem occurs with the headset disconnected from the PC.
There might be one thing I screwed up: The PiMax was plugged in when I installed Windows. Hence it was recognized as a monitor and Windows actually made it the main monitor. Thus I went into the display settings and ‘disabled’ the display. However, the PiMax is not shown as a monitor anymore since I insalled PiTool, so I can’t undo that.
I tried reinstalling PiTool. I tried running it as Administrator. I tried restarting my PC countless times with and without the PiMax connected. I tried starting PiTool with the headset disconnected. I tried just starting SteamVR, which can’t seem to detect the headset.
Anything I can do? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank!
Disabling it don’t fully removes it, if you haven’t tried already, go in device manager, and check if the Pimax driver is still there under Monitor tab, right click it and uninstall it completely so that the only remaining one is your monitor driver, uninstall Pitool completely, reboot and try reinstall Pitool.
Also, some more experienced users could tell you what best Pitool version to use in this case…
The PiMax is not shown as a monitor anymore, only my two regular screens are in the list.
I already installed all the packages for x64 on this list that I found: Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Packages · GitHub
DirectX is apparently already installed with windows, it wouldn’t let me install it anyways.
I don’t have 76 unfortunately but I already installed a few games and ran them.
I finally found the log folder in %APPDATA%/Local so I’ll be sharing a few logs (I crossed out the serial number deliberately):
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I also reinstalled my graphics driver. While it was reinstalling, for a brief moment, the PiMax LED turned blue and it showed my desktop wallpaper in the Headset. It went away shortly after, though.
It still wouldn’t switch to green so I fiddled around with the DFU tool, until my headset wouldn’t work at all anymore. Just white flashing. Since none of the DFU tools posted for the PiMax seemed to work I got the official STM DFU Tool from https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stsw-stm32080.html . Hold all three buttons on the HMD, plug it in, let go of power, right and left in that order with 8 seconds between each. This gets the HMD into DFU mode. The STM tool will find the HMD, even if all the other tools fail. Next, I flashed the dfu file from https://community.openmr.ai/t/release-pimax-4k-firmware/20 with the STM tool.
Now, when I connect the HMD I get a blue light. And PiTool runs. Finally. However, PiTool still says “Disconnected”, which is somewhat annoying as it still doesn’t work. Any idea?
I got it to work perfectly now. I’ll post the procedure here, just for reference. All these steps were necessary for me.
Create a new Windows 10 Installer USB Stick. This is done with the Microsoft Media Creation Tool and pretty simple. I used to use a approx. 6 month old version, which didn’t work. Get the latest and greatest.
Install Windows on a plain HDD. Do this with the HMD DISCONNECTED at all times. Connecting the Pimax while the setup is running will break things.
Windows Installation also installed the Radeon Driver software for me. Install the Pimax PiTool 1.0.84.
If the PiTool doesnt start (just closes itself after the blue Pi logo), go to C:/Program Files/Pimax/Runtime/ and delete the file ssleay32.dll. Reboot your PC.
Now you can finally plug in the HMD. PiTool should already be autostarted with Windows and the LED should turn blue. The Pimax works at this point.
Thanks for the support everyone! Finally, even XPlane works in VR, which is what gave me trouble in Windows 7 originally. I hope I can afford an 8K one day The Pimax is a great product after all and it would’ve been pretty sad for me to not get it back to work. I’ll keep in contact with the support team to ensure they can provide a workaround to other users if necessary.
The Pimax is a great product after all and it would’ve been pretty sad for me to not get it back to work. I’ll keep in contact with the support team to ensure they can provide a workaround to other users if necessary.
