Hi. This is sort of an introduction and a build log.
I’m the CEO of a small indie game company, Preston Jong Productions, In. I got added to the beta test program November 2019. Our goal is to give feedback on our progress (a bit late), and we hope to help others as they work on their builds. While this is in beta, we are hoping to incorporate some of the motion data we capture into a current VR game in production. Currently we use a lot of stock animations we bought from other companies.
Just as the beta kit arrived in late February, we were in the process of buying a home, moving, then selling a home, and then corona hit. I also had to get a few other things. But this past week I started working on devoting more time to beta testing. Here is my progress thus far:
1- Flash SD card - The first SD card was poor quality and only 2 GB. So it failed because the image was I think over 3 GB. I searched through my home and after 3 hrs of searching I found a 32 GB micro card. It worked. But the program (balenaEtcher) failed during reading. That may have been due to the OS or my computer because it started to access the card after the image was flashed. So I think that the reading by balenaEtcher and my OS had a read conflict. I went on and tested it (next step), and it does pass.
2- Power up Raspberry Pi 3 for the first time. This was all new for me. I inserted the flash card. Got logged in using the provided credentials. I went in and had to change the keyboard localization to be English (US) because I have a # in my WiFi network password. Shh don’t tell anyone. I could only type the £ symbol and not #. Took some time to connect to my MiFi network still because I had mac filtering on. I ran the iconfig wlan0 command and found the mac address and soon I was connected to my WiFi and getting an IP address.
3- This part needs to be in bold and RED in the user instructions and a warning symbol like an electric bolt. WARNING! Don’t live plug the K-Ceptors! It will burn out the buck converter! I powered things down. Inserted a K-Ceptor to J1. Powered things up. Well I think my cable was not fully inserted. I was being timid in inserting it. I pushed in the cable and then the blue LED went off on the hub.
4- Ordered some jumper wires (female to female) and a few days later I followed the diagram to wire up the 3.3 v bridge between the Raspberry Pi 3 and the hub. The blue light came back on. Then shortly after that I had my first K-Ceptor calibrated.
5- Blender 2.83 – Downloaded and installed this. Ran into an issue with Blender just opening and closing. Read a bit online. A lot of people talked about updating this and installing that. I swapped out the HDMI cables and then Blender opened just fine.
6- Installed blender add on (chordata_1-0-0_d8227990.zip).
7- Calibrated my first K-Ceptor – First time I picked it up too soon and it gave back an error that it was detecting motion. I still went through the rest of the calibration, but then repeated it. Second time I made sure not to touch the K-Ceptor till instructed. Message was “Calibration successfully recorded to K-Ceptor EEPROM, exiting.”
8- Ran command to test calibration “./notochord –scan <my computer’s IP address>”, Then in blender on <Connect> on the node called “Notochord Node”. My K-Cepter model in the scene moves and looks to be moving according to how I move the K-Cepter. But only for 3-4 seconds. Then it gives an “unknown error” and stops. I tried this 3 times.
I’m going to hold off to calibrate another K-Cepter till I figure out why its only staying connected for a few seconds.
In summary thus far I think you have very good documentation. I was able to follow things and get this far. Its been a new experience for me working with not the Chordata Motion system, but mostly also with Raspberry Pi and Blender.
