Jump to content

Freetrack: How do you increase the viewing angle of the LEDs?


Recommended Posts

My experience with freetrack so far hasn't been good, chiefly because the viewing angle of the LEDs i could find is not wide enough. I am sure you can imagine how frustrating not being able to view freely during a dogfight is... I live in Singapore, a small city, where I have very remote hope of finding the Sfh465xx LEDs recommended in the manual.

 

After consulting the manual, I came across the method of increasing the viewing angle of the LEDs by "filing the lens tips down flat". But I have no idea what that means... Can somebody please enlighten me on this, please? Or do you have better methods than this? I really appreciate it... Thanks in advance!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

LED method is old and not effective. You have to put much work to get good results.

 

This sentence:

filing the lens tips down flat
means you must file down bulb almost to the this metal thin rod. Get a nail file from your woman and do it by this way :)

 

I'd recommend you get flash stripes. It is much better because you don't care about angle of view. You only need IR camera - camera with in-built IR leds, which will light your cap on your head.

I have such construction:

 

2011-11-03%25252000.13.36.jpg

 

As you see I don't have solid frame. I can move my strips to the better positions on the cap. No power source, no wires, no metal frame on my head :)

 

When you make stripes round - you cam make them visible at angle of 270 - you gain freely look and comfort.

 

2011-11-04%25252018.36.23.jpg

Reminder: Fighter pilots make movies. Bomber pilots make... HISTORY! :D | Also to be remembered: FRENCH TANKS HAVE ONE GEAR FORWARD AND FIVE BACKWARD :D

ಠ_ಠ



Link to comment
Share on other sites

Take some rough sand paper, file, or other implement of destruction. File the LED's so the tips are flattened. The idea is to diffuse the light from the narrow beam they're usually setup with.

 

Other than that, you can play with the camera settings to help out with the detection.

i5-4670K@4.5GHz / 16 GB RAM / SSD / GTX1080

Rift CV1 / G-seat / modded FFB HOTAS

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • ED Team

with the home made led setups I have used I did flatten the heads down and they are very effective.

 

I recently decided to take the plunge and order a trackclip pro to use, just waiting for delivery :)

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/album.php?albumid=607

smallCATPILOT.PNG.04bbece1b27ff1b2c193b174ec410fc0.PNG

Forum rules - DCS Crashing? Try this first - Cleanup and Repair - Discord BIGNEWY#8703 - Youtube - Patch Status

Windows 11, NVIDIA MSI RTX 3090, Intel® i9-10900K 3.70GHz, 5.30GHz Turbo, Corsair Hydro Series H150i Pro, 64GB DDR @3200, ASUS ROG Strix Z490-F Gaming, HP Reverb G2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, things didn't quite work out... I flattened the front part of the LED glass. The viewing angle didn't increase much, if at all. Now it is not bright enough. From my usual sitting distance, the camera (ps3 eye) sees the other two LEDs, but not the one that I have flattened. I have to be very close to the camera in order for it to see all three. It is completely unusable now... Help... Please...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • ED Team

are you using a filter over your ps3 camera or have you removed the IR filter from the ps3 camera?

 

or do you just have the camera as is

 

picture.php?albumid=607&pictureid=4186

 

 

using some used negative film from a 35mm camera you can filter out a lot of natural light.


Edited by BIGNEWY

smallCATPILOT.PNG.04bbece1b27ff1b2c193b174ec410fc0.PNG

Forum rules - DCS Crashing? Try this first - Cleanup and Repair - Discord BIGNEWY#8703 - Youtube - Patch Status

Windows 11, NVIDIA MSI RTX 3090, Intel® i9-10900K 3.70GHz, 5.30GHz Turbo, Corsair Hydro Series H150i Pro, 64GB DDR @3200, ASUS ROG Strix Z490-F Gaming, HP Reverb G2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • ED Team
Hi BIGNEWY, I have removed the IR filter inside my ps3 eye. Now I suspect it is because the battery is dying. I am now gonna buy some new battery. Will update you asap. Thx.

 

No problem, let us know how you get on,

 

I also started to use the batteries up, so made myself a usb version of the headtrack clip, no worrying about running out of juice now :)

smallCATPILOT.PNG.04bbece1b27ff1b2c193b174ec410fc0.PNG

Forum rules - DCS Crashing? Try this first - Cleanup and Repair - Discord BIGNEWY#8703 - Youtube - Patch Status

Windows 11, NVIDIA MSI RTX 3090, Intel® i9-10900K 3.70GHz, 5.30GHz Turbo, Corsair Hydro Series H150i Pro, 64GB DDR @3200, ASUS ROG Strix Z490-F Gaming, HP Reverb G2

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Wide Angle LEDs

 

Also u can use freetrack with display lamps. It works fine, better then diodes.

No any problem with angles and very easy to build. Also you should not to delete IR filters from camera.

http://www.ukrfalcons.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2288

 

Very good link and tutorial but I'm not very big on display lamps. I don't know about you guys but I have projector at home and I play in a dark room. I personally would find the glare of the visible light from the side of my head to be annoying.


Edited by momashi
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Your main problem with the view angle of the IR LEDs stems from the fact that you are probably ordering random no-name ones from eBay which have typically view angles of 50 degrees. After doing doing a bit of research I found some IR LEDs that have view angles of 180 degrees made by Panasonic:

 

Model LN152-ND:

 

http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&itemSeq=112869699&uq=634690579595502559

 

They're a little more expensive (about 2$ per diode as opposed to 4 diodes for 2$ on eBay) but who care (you only need 3...).

 

If for any reason, you're viewing this posting several years later and this model is off the market, digikey has a great search engine (where you can filter out the view angles you don't want and list by unit price).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As many before me have already said, to improve the viewing angle of cheaper (non-wide) LEDs you can file them down using something like a nail file. I think it is visible in some of my pictures of my FreeTrack cap how I did (there are nice whiteish marks on the cap from my inaccurate filing :) ).

http://forums.eagle.ru/album.php?albumid=315

 

Have a look if you're still looking for help. FreeTrack works great for me! The LEDs I used were some random no-name cheap LEDs from my nearby electronics shop. I've been using that very cap with great success without any issues at all since late 2008! Sturdy construction ;). Probably something like 10-20h gaming with the cap every week for the last 2-2.5 years.


Edited by Boulund

Core i5-760 @ 3.6Ghz, 4GB DDR3, Geforce GTX470, Samsung SATA HDD, Dell UH2311H 1920x1080, Saitek X52 Pro., FreeTrack homemade cap w/ LifeCam VX-1000, Windows 7 Professional x64 SP1.

FreeTrack in DCS A10C (64bit): samttheeagle's headtracker.dll

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 7 months later...
LED method is old and not effective. You have to put much work to get good results.

 

 

I'd recommend you get flash stripes. It is much better because you don't care about angle of view. You only need IR camera - camera with in-built IR leds, which will light your cap on your head.

I have such construction:

 

What the heck are flash stripes? I currently use LEDs on my Freetrack setup and would like to get away from the batteries and aforementioned narrow angle problem.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...