Edtracker Pro Wired and Opentrack

[Roger Gunkel]

Having become tired of trying to change view with the hat on the joystick or scrolling the mouse, I decided to purchase the Edtracker Pro Wired and venture into the world of head tracking.

The unit including tax and postage in the UK came to £47 and arrived 3 days ago. It is a small plastic box around 30x45x14mm with a phone type usb socket and a small green light, that's it. There is a note to go to the website address attached and download the software. This is very swift and I installed the programme onto my Win10 system. There is a simple UI that talks you through the initial setup, and with the device fixed to the top of my headset with the included sticky velcro pads, I plugged in one of many usb leads that I have and loaded Condor2.

Condor failed to recognise it and after many attempts, I gave up and sent a ticket to the support email. As it was Friday night and their site said there was no support outside of Mon-Fri, I was surprised to get a very helpful email back on Saturday morning. They suggested that although many programmes would recognise Edtracker automatically as a joystick, Condor may be one that does not. They suggested that I downloaded the free Opentrack programme which acts as an interface.

I duly downloaded Opentrack and was presented with a slightly daunting interface and not much in the way of instruction. The software though, recognised the tracker which needed to be set as a joystick. I experimented with different settings for about 30 minutes and eventually Condor recognised it correctly and I tried a couple of short flights. It enhanced the programme immensely, giving the IRL feel of being able to look where I want when I want. Flying the downwind leg of a circuit whilst being able to constantly glance to the side at the landing strip was a joy, as was looking over my head momentarily to spot the cloud I was trying to fly under.

There was a slightly annoying problem which was drift in the view. Every few minutes I had to re centre the view as it was drifting off the screen. I sorted that yesterday evening by completely redoing the Edtracker movement alignment and reducing the smoothing in Condor. I followed that with a 55 minute flight which required no further centring whatsoever.

I would say that if anyone doesn't use head tracking at the moment, this is a very affordable way to greatly enhance your experience of the already excellent Condor. Edtracker definitely gets my recommendation

Roger

[h.kreso]

I made myself Edtrack first with giro, but, had problem with centering to. Two years ago I made with magnetometar, It's works perfect, in Condor and X-Plane to. You must calibrate good, and in Opentrack maping axis. I'm very happy with Edtracker

[sir_clive]

I just received my EDTRACKER PRO (wired). It's working like a charm in the EdTracker application and in the OpenTrack, but I can't get Condor to recognize it.

What settings are you using in OpenTrack? After a lot of experimentation, I think this might be the way to go:

Input: Joystick (EDTracker Pro)
Output: Joystick emulation - vjoystick

OpenTrack registers my head movements, vjoystick receives the input and does its' thing, everything seems to be setup nicely - I just can't seem to be able to assign the controls in Condor. BTW - which controls am I supposed to assign? Input -> Assign Controls -> View pan [left-right-up-down]? Regardless of which one I select, I can move my head whatever I want, nothing happens. After a while, selection is deactivated and the default key is there.

BTW - just before I posted this, I noticed that if I select "Mouse emulation" in opentrack, activate "Mouse look", deactivate "Left button for mouse look", I do get *some* movement in Condor, which then re-centers after a second or so.

BTW #2: I also just noticed that since EdTracker and vjoystick are installed, view panning per NUM keys is also not working. I get just a minor deflection, which re-centers after a second. Only 7 and 9 are working (snap view pan). The same thing with mouse (button pressed) panning! I am *pretty* sure that looking around used to work before I installed edtracker and vjoystick, can't verify it now though.

[sir_clive]

UPDATE: after fiddling around with it some more, I found the way how to "force" the (I think) correct settings for the direct input into the controls file C:\Users\[user name]\Documents\Condor\Pilots\[pilot name]\controls.ini - just add at the end of the file:

[{090A5550-E914-11E8-8002-444553540000}]
3027=12
3028=12
3029=16
3030=16

3027-3030 must be removed from the rest of the file, I suppose. 12 is the vjoystick X axis on my setup, 16 Y axis.

I was able to find the ID of the VJoy device by assigning Bank/Pitch commands to VJoy axes (that worked in the "Input->Assign controls" dialog!) On your system, that will probably be a different number. I found the IDs (3027-3030) by changing the keys for the "pan view" stuff from within Condor setup, and then checking what changed in the file.

This is how it now looks:

commands.PNG

Unfortunately, still no luck. Oh, and 7 and 9, which were the only keys which seemed to work, are now also behaving very "funky" (no better way to describe it).

Mouse panning (button + mouse movement) still works as previously - namely barely, it shows a small deflection, then re-centers.

I somehow have the feeling that view panning is simply not working in Condor, at least on my system. Could it be? I tought it was working, I'm sure I was looking at the clouds above in my previous flights! Maybe a windows update botched it somehow?

I'll uninstall EdTracker tomorrow and give it another try with keys only, just to make sure it's not some strange interaction.

[sir_clive]

Replying to my own post again...

After tinkering with settings (don't know what all I changed) the re-centering after 1 second is gone. Still, the deflection is only about 2-3 degrees, if even that. 7 and 9 on numerical keypad are working as expected. Furthermore, if I press and hold 7 or 9, and then try to pan the view with numpad keys, the panning suddenly works!

Now I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with Edtracker any more.

[sir_clive]

FINALLY!!!!

Oh man... I'm really spamming here!

Out of desperation, I changed the opentrack output to "freetrack 2.0 enhanced", and suddenly I have my head movements in Condor! I was not able to find any reference in the manual about Condor supporting freetrack 2.0 protocol - maybe you could consider putting it in there.

I feel like a complete idiot - there is no need to configure ANYTHING in Condor.

Still, the thing with panning per keyboard still isn't working, but I don't care any more.

I'll just leave this spam here, maybe it will help some other poor soul.

[janjansen]

"freetrack 2.0 enhanced" is simply an opensource implementation of the trackir protocol. Condor supports trackir, and as a result, anything compatible with it, like freetrack even though developers may never have targeted it or even heard of it. The same goes for any game that supports trackir, they will also support freetrack.

But yes, I suppose it might be useful to mention this in the manual somewhere.

And yes, when opentrack is installed, panning no longer works, even if you disable tracking in opentrack. This isnt the case with trackir, and I dont know why they behave differently, but Im fairly sure its due to opentrack implementation.

[BA]

Cheers

I built one up by myself (soldering) and it worx like a charm with opentrack.
Once you've installed and calibrated it via the EDtracker UI-software you only have to run Opentrack in the background and that's all.
As sir clive stated: you need to use "freetrack 2.0 Enhanced" in the output pulldown menu

The advantage of using this tracker is the fact it does not use a second device like a camera.
My settings below:

[BA]

part2

[BA]

part 3