Categories
Uri_ba's pit VR

Taking to the sky – VR adventures Part III

As you are aware at this point, I own an HTC vive. I actually use it only in a sit down scenarios at this point (this blog is about my cockpit after all :-)).

I’ve been using the Vive for almost two weeks now, so join me to this breakdown of my user experience, so you can make the correct choice for yourself.

However, I will try and describe my experience, both ups and downs. However, I explicitly choose NOT to give a one line bottom line. I firmly believe that VR is very much a case of YMMV.

so if you came looking for a bottom line, save yourself some time 🙂
For the rest of you… let’s get started…

Categories
Uri_ba's pit

DEDuino – Some more performance tuning

I’ve been Working on some way to streamline performance as much as I could. The biggest performance limiter, is the drawing of the big screens (DED/PFD),

One of the tricks I’ve thought might help was to switch the display from 2 bit color mode to 1 bit (4 shades of “grayscale” to only “black and white”) theoretically – a 100% boost, it practice I have discovered I had a bug in the code all along. Apparently U8Glib has a switch to handle displays bigger then 240pixels, I’ve known about it but as long as I’ve been using the grayscale mode, I’ve been unaware of it (because the part that didn’t work was black). once I’ve switched to BW mode – it lit up casing stripes on the screen.

To fix this, and simply basic installation, I thought about including the entire U8Glib library, with the required change in the folder. Unfortunatly, the Arduino IDE does not allow this, So I’ll be including a ZIP file with the modified library for easy import into the IDE.

I’ve also found out that  my plan to flip the DED display (to allow better weight distribution in the case) is a very bad idea as putting in “rotate 180” on the screen almost halfs the FPS.

I’ll be working on this some more till the PCBs arrive – but I think this is pretty much the limit as far as my ability to optimize the code to improve refresh rate.