Raspberry pi - Oculus Adapter for console!

"kirklasalle" wrote:
... funny, I was just following a thread on mtbs3d that you and another (forgot name) were commenting on some of that very same code for the hydra. I'm even more excited to know about the hydra support. ... I do have a question though... I just started to get into my rpi last night and I was kind of leaning to ArchLinux as I thought it may be "lighter", faster, etc. but, I see a lot of Raspi mention. I have run that as well so, I was wondering which is a better option for the rpi? Or just any thoughts that would work well for this type of project.

Regarding hydra support, the hydra seems to periodically report the wrong axis when reading it at 250Hz (typically every fourth HID packet). Instead of just filtering it out (which adds latency), I was trying to detect and discard the faulty packets. That code needs to be more robust.

Raspbian linux (debian, compiled for ARM with hw float support) seems to be the best option for general use, although I have also played with TinyCore linux and raw hardware support (native mode, where your app runs as if it were a linux kernel). There is even a native mode USB HID stack, with support for a number of gaming console game controllers (wired to GPIO pins). Much simpler to just support Raspbian linux though, IMHO.

I will probably post my rift and hydra support code at some point. Until today, my newest stuff had been lost on an SSD that windows no longer recognized as containing a valid partition. After trying a number of different repair tools (with little success), I finally resurrected the lost partition with TestDisk, and now I have my source code back. Just before it died, I did a secure erase on the mirror SSD because it was getting too slow, so this SSD died at just the wrong time. All is well now though, thankfully. SSD TRIM support does not work on RAIDs, and is not effective when a drive is mostly full, so an occasional ATA Secure Erase restores full rated write speed. But that leaves a window open if the other drive goes awry as happened this time. Perhaps time to start doing backups to the cloud, eh? For now, I have it stored in three places, but offsite storage is even better.