Hey all

Was having some funky issues with my TIR today - it tracked okay, but a bit jittery, a bit unstable at the edges of movement. Locked into the Tracking Window, saw some of the three dots go red occasionally, and they also showed some red pixels beneath the green rectangle of the tracking clip. Red means bad, obviously, but these are the same light conditions as always, same environment - no clue why it would degrade.

I then plugged it into a different port on my powered USB hub, windows reinstalled the drivers - and now this is gone, the Tracking view looks as clean as ever.

Driver damaged? USB Port funky? No clue what this was.

Mine sometimes acts up but I just have to unplug it and plug it back into the same USB port and its fine after that.
I amuse that Windows just doesn't always detect it properly on boot up.

Me too. I've always been flummoxed by XP's USB scheme. I found if I plugged it into a another USB port it wouldn't recognize it, but unplugging and plugging it back into the same USB port fixed the issues you descibe.

RSColonel if you plug it back into the old port does the problem come back?

Actually no, I just tried that - no problems on the previous port anymore, either.

But I actually had the system switched off yesterday and saw the problem persisting after next boot, so it doesn't seem like just cycling power (or unplug/plug) should have solved it.

The for me interesting thing is that I wouldn't have been surprised if it goes dead on one port or something like that - but to have a reduced tracking quality, yet still be properly detected and working in software is a weird thing for an USB port.

Have you checked the 'light filtering' setting?

Yep, that was the same as always. The whole setup was the same as always - same software settings, same geometry, same background lights and items - so I find it really surprising that a "bad" USB port or initialization lead to such a reduced tracking performance.

Now after fixing it, all my three rectangles of the clip are permanently green, no red flashing, no red pixels anywhere. This definitely was worse yesterday.

It's all good either way, but surprising why such things can happen. I was already worried the hardware might be damaged.