Today we (@TheIronWolf and myself) made an interesting observation about the lighthouses diagnostic, which I believe may help others to check possible source of problems, and while it is public info, I would like to sum up it here as it may not be obvious.
The only way to communicate with the v1 Valve lighthouses is by bluetooth. The known application is the power management. There is however another communication channel, which is one-way only and which allows the lighthouse to transmit some id, telemetry and diagnostics to the tracked device (i.e the headset or the controller) by using “omnidirectional light” (https://github.com/nairol/LighthouseRedox/blob/master/docs/Light%20Emissions.md), i.e. the red LEDs matrices (as the lasers do not transmit any info in v1).
The info which is received by the tracked device can be found in lighthousedb.json file, which appears at different places for different versions of PiTool:
EDIT2: It seems that there are two versions of the file. One is related to OG Vive operation (if it was ever installed) and is at \Steam\config\lighthouse\lighthousedb.json.
Pimax “version” is at:
%USERHOME%\AppData\Local\Pimax\runtime\config\lighthouse\lighthousedb.json
with the older PiTool version, and at
%ProgramData%\pimax\runtime\config\lighthouse\lighthousedb.json with the newer PiTool versions.
The file contains dynamic_state records of the format:
{
"dynamic_state" : {
"basestation_mode" : 2,
"faults" : 0,
"firmware_version" : 436,
"gravity_vector" : [ -0.0130861588, 0.830971062, 0.556161702 ],
"reset_count" : 58,
"sobChannel" : 0
},
"first_id" : 1,
"last_id" : 1,
"tilt" : {
"pitch" : 0.548768699,
"roll" : 0.030082861,
"variance" : 5.01351587e-06
},
"time_last_seen" : "1548234142"
},
The interesting (and important) point is that if the lighthouse runs the latest firmware (v436) the firmware v298 and later, it also supports auto-diagnostic, which corresponds to the faults item and also can manifest itself as the red light LED on the lighthouse itself.
The different fields in the JSON file, including the potential faults code, are described here: https://github.com/nairol/LighthouseRedox/blob/master/docs/Base%20Station.md#base-station-info-block.
Anyone who faces problem with the tracking may this way first check the firmware version and then eventually also the errors reported to confirm that the lighthouse hardware works ok.
The reference thread: [Solved]Yay, received my 5K+, but can't connect bases
