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Having an action webcam strapped with bow ribbons to my XR glasses grinning mad into the smartphone cam. A bunch of wires are also strapped to the glasses.
Video: How to get 6DOF with older 3DOF XR glasses using Breezy and OpenTrack

Breezy can now turn a 3DOF (degree of freedom) device into a 6DOF device by augmenting the missing positional data from a webcam. Spoiler! It is not the cam strapped to my face – this is just for the demo you can watch here, on PeerTube or YouTube.

The cam, that I used for this task, is sitting on my monitor. How this works? Well not with magic! This requires a somewhat decent webcam – really anything from the last decade should suffice – and OpenTrack, of course.

OpenTrack is a head-tracking application with multiple tracker plugins. One of it’s plugins is the Neuralnet Tracker, an AI powered extension that comes with a bunch of different head pose models to choose from. With a webcam connected this can now locally run the detection model with very low latency – so it’s usually blazing fast on most systems!

This alone is already 6DOF and is used a lot for gaming already – so what does Breezy do with this? Simple! It reads the forwarded data via an UDP listener, a very quick way to transmit data on a local network or system [and complements it’s own rotational data with the missing positional data].

With this a Breezy user still gets the rotational data from the XR’s very sensitive IMU, that is short for Inertial Measurement Unit btw, and the not so important positional data sent from OpenTrack.

This works of course only while the webcam can still see the user. So sadly no walking around while using this.

And the best thing? It can also send the data back! This means that the very same combined values can be forwarded – e.g. to a computer game – benefiting from the best available data sources for rotation and position.

That’s not the main use case, of course, and only of importance for some nerds like myself. This is mostly relevant for the productivity features of Breezy, because sometimes a text may be too small to read with the glasses on. We do no longer have to increase the font size – we can now simply lean in! That is a feature that is usually only available with glasses, that come with little cameras of their own, so they can have native 6DOF support. And when I say native I mean that such glasses usually also outsource exactly this calculation to the connected computer. It’s my understanding that this seems to require a lot of computation power, which is something many XR users with the more modern devices complain about.

Well not so much with OpenTrack and the Neuralnet tracker, that utilizes the ONNX runtime under the hood. That’s a high-performance, cross-platform engine to power exactly such models locally. The runtime automatically makes use of the best available hardware acceleration, if there is any.

Overall I’m rather hyped about this feature – especially because I’m using the OpenTrack output option of Breezy for quite some time now, to get a VR like experience with stereoscopic 3D rendering in Side-By-Side mode. I can now keep using my older XR glasses and still enjoy this more modern 6DOF feature. This is rather expensive hardware after all.

And all that on Linux PC!

Breezy xr_driver: https://github.com/wheaney/breezy-desktop by https://www.youtube.com/@WayneHeaney

Official Announcement XR desktop with 6DoF + multiple displays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFLmjpjF-rA

Music “Life’s Worth Dying For” CC BY-SA 3.0 “LostDrone”. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Verify at https://soundcloud.com/lostdrone/rock-lostdrone-lifes-worth-dying-for-free-download-and-creative-commons-license

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The Little Witcher (Goodreads)
In this delightful comic twist on the magical world of …

❤️ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217245570-the-little-witcher

In this delightful comic twist on the magical world of The Witcher, Geralt of Rivia is just your average monster-slaying dad, trying to raise young Ciri to be a good kid while teaching her all about life as a Witcher.

Oh my… cuteness overload. Straight to my 🛒

 

https://beko.famkos.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/raspberry-pi-gift.jpg

An unboxed Raspberry Pi 3B+ next to it's box

Got a late present for my birthday from my parents (we couldn’t see each other much over the last months). A brand new Raspberry Pi 3B+ for more home cockpit shenanigans 🤓 Man my parents are awesome.

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Finally replaced the old display with a new touch display in my VF-1 inspired home cockpit panel.

The old display was salvaged from a laptop years ago and while it was working fine it also has a very bad viewing angle. I also got really tired of it’s glaring reflections so I experimented with an anti glare foil. This reduced the reflections a lot (worth every cent) but couldn’t help with the bad viewing angle, of course. I now had an idea how this could look though so I decided to buy into a replacement kit.

The new display is the N173HCE-E31, a 17.3" with a resolution of 1920x1080. The touch controller registeres as a USB HID pointer/mouse by ILITEK and is basically sitting on top of the display. The kit included a PCB, that was advertised as VS-RTD2556HC-V2 controller by VSDISPLAY but came without any data sheet and I have no idea who really made this.

Thing is this PCB runs very hot and the noted input voltage isn’t explicitly stated. An attached image suggested to use an USB PD power supply without 20V so I was looking for it’s datasheet to check if I was just holding it wrong. Picture me surprised but VSDISPLAY does not list this particular configuration in it’s datasheets. I contacted them via mail and they confirmed that this is not theirs. Theirs is apparently also strictly 5V/12V so that matches the picture I get.

Mine is equipped with the IC RTD2556VD that does not match the list of supported ICs. Theirs has 2556TE_R20.1 printed on the PCB. Mine has 2555TF_R30.1 printed on. It’s like 99% similar but differently routed. It also mentions E470791 JPX-D which seems to point to the PCB manufacturer Dongguan Jingweixin Circuit Co Ltd but that is where my GoogleFu left me. I did also find the very same pictures on other offers, each stating a completely different controller model 🤷

Anyway. I tried different configurations and while it works with 5V at ~2A I feel way more comfortable with 12V at ~0.8A on full brightness + blue color. I also attached a passive cooling block I had laying around and slapped a fan on top. Now it’s only “comfortable” warm to the touch after running for an hour.

Sadly I do not have any device with DP ALT providing more than 5V and the PCB will always switch down to 5V the moment the USB-C dedicated for the display signal is used as well, even when a proper USB PD power supply is attached on it’s dedicated power connector. I could only keep it at 12V with my VITURE USB-C XR charging adapter, which can indeed provide 12V and more via USB-C while still allowing DP-ALT + USB2. There went my plans to only have a single cable for all, DP, PD and the USB2 lanes for the ILITEK pointer, because I really do not want to block this adapter all the time.

So now I have a dedicaded USB PD power supply at 12V connected, a HDMI connection for the display and an additional USB2 for the touchpanel pointer – and on top of that the little fan, that I simply connected to the micro USB2 socket on the PCB to provide it with 5V.

This also means that my Linux PC can not know that both, touch panel pointer and display, belong together. As a result all touch panel inputs were all over the place and not limited to a single display. Apparently KDE has an option in it’s graphical settings where this can be easily configured. Gnome does not [yet?] have such an option in it’s graphical settings. There is however a way to enforce the mapping of the touch panel in Gnome too! And while the real manufacturer for the controller of the new display is still a mystery to me I found the following snippet in my monitor configuration $HOME/.config/monitors.xml after plugging the controller in:

<monitorspec>
    <connector>HDMI-2</connector>
    <vendor>RTK</vendor>
    <product>0x2555</product>
    <serial>0x20230705</serial>
</monitorspec>

The touch panel is, according to lsusb, connected as ID 222a:0001 ILI Technology Corp. Multi-Touch Screen. Armed with that knowledge I can limit it’s input with gsettings to this specific display:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchscreen:/org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchscreens/222a:0001/ output "['RTK', '0x2555', '0x20230705']"

Works like a charm but what a mess. I still wish I had a data sheet for this so if you know more kindly drop me a comment!

The last thing to fix was the already mentioned reflective glare. For this I went with a screen protector by BROTECT (that name still makes me laugh), that promises beside anti scratch also an anti glare effect without limiting the view angles (some foils do this to enhance privacy).

Attaching the foil was straight forward. The trick is to make sure that not a single dust particle is around during the process. To help with this I used an air humidifier to raise the humidity in the room before I even started. After that I removed the protective cover from the display and started slapping on the foil with the provided mounting card (yay, cardboard again). This was the very moment one of my curious cats decided to investigate my actions and jumped onto the table almost giving me a heart attack. The last thing I needed was cat hair all over the place and indeed after a lot of hissing I had to make good use of the also provided adhesive sticker to catch all dust particles in the last corner. Cats!

The end result is like night and day. I do no longer see any light sources or myself clearly reflected on the display. The touch panel is still accepting inputs just fine and the colours look very bright from any angle, especially with HDR enabled. This will also ease it’s cleaning because the cockpit panel is collecting dust like crazy due to the gradient of the panel. I usually use a vacuum cleaner for this and the foil will help a lot to avoid scratches.

Replacing the old display was also a task on it’s own. The old screws didn’t fit, of course, so I kinda had to build little adapters from leftover angle and wood pieces. Very ugly but good enough – this is just a toy after all 🤓

Ah yes and now that I have a touch panel I also have to rewrite my HUD app, of course 🙃

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So what happens when sheer stubbornness, a glorified button box, Ace Combat and the Unreal Engine Scripting System meet? Pure magic. I got the game to spew out a constant stream of telemetry data and events in search for more immersion in my VF-1 inspired home cockpit. The approach is the very same that I used for X4 Foundations before: Side load lib Luasocket, get a network connection established and start dumping extracted game data to it. This is highly experimental and the result of hacking away for the last ~4 nights. This video demonstrates the results:

https://makertube.net/w/cbXJAveVgVTGVEi58akVTA / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50J-gjkgJxE

To be perfectly clear: I am aware that Ace Combat is not a “flight sim”, not really worth of an API, and I know that DCS or BMS does it better and in greater detail and even with realism. This is not the point. I started working on this just for fun and to satisfy my own curiosity to see *if I can make it*. This may be hard to believe but chipping rocks together until the computer does what I want is “quality time” for me 🤓

You may have noticed that I’m a Macross fan and that my SimPit is heavily inspired by a VF-1 Valkyrie and that I usually use a modded VF-1 plane in AC as well. This is my personal substitute for the lack of any decent Macross / Robotech game since Macross VOXP.

This said I usually fly Space Pew Pew games with this cockpit so everything you see going on is designed for _space_ and not for flight sim. This is also why I sometimes talk about “ships” or “docked”. This is wording found everywhere in my plumbing pipeline for telemetry. All games I play, that can use this, send their data over this. The idea is that I do not have to rewrite half of the connected systems for every game so I transform the data into a unified format before.

You can read more about this on the dedicated project website https://simpit.dev (and here, of course). I will soon update it with some more details for Ace Combat. If this looks like something you’d like to try let me know, I’d love to connect. I’m active on various social media. Please do let me know if you find this inspiring.

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The (demo) was sitting in my backlog for a while now. Last time I tried I was not able to really start but most of the menu navigation issues with joysticks are fixed now. In fact it accepted any joystick I threw at it.

Bindings menu listing a lot of connected input devices and offers remapping and calibration for each

It also supports ultra wide screen, runs smooth af and just works™ with Proton. There is really not much else I can ask of a space pew pew [indie]game in 2025. Well mayhap OpenTrack UDP support but let’s not nitpick 😀

Display menu with various ingame features like resolution, FPS lock and counter

Can’t say much about the story, since the demo doesn’t feature much of any. I got to see some neat features, like landing on a carrier, which required approaching through a virtual corridor until the carrier snagged me in. There’s also a path to follow during a jump adding a mini game to this procedure as well.

Some sort of fast travel, which is very colourful, requiring the pilot to stay within a specific path.

It also offers the genre typical shield and energy management, boosting and drifting, targeting of subsystems or missiles and counter measures so or players should feel right at home. This goes to my wishlist 🤓

Let’s see. Hope ActivityPub works again as expected. I guess I’ll live without the Redis cache for a while to see if everything works again as expected. The admin tax is too real 😩

SRS (Simple Realtime Server) | SRS (ossrs.net)
SRS is a simple, high efficiency and realtime video server, supports RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, HTTP-FLV, SRT, MPEG-DASH and GB28181. Oryx is an all-in-one, out-of-the-box, and open-source video solution for creating online video services, including live streaming and WebRTC, on the cloud or through self-hosting.

🔖 https://ossrs.net/lts/en-us/

> SRS is a simple, high efficiency and realtime video server

Mebbe an alternative for my current RTMP setup. Preliminary tests looked good but I could never push an AV1 stream *with* video though to Opencast even with “source” setting. I’m not 100% sure yet if I was holding ffmpeg wrong though => tbrl

Oh.

Starting November 15th, 2025, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock and all its DLCs will no longer be available for purchase on any platform. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/544610/view/570395033724780780?l=english

It seems to be currently on sale on GOG so mebbe grab it if you don’t have it yet: https://www.gog.com/en/game/battlestar_galactica_deadlock

That was one of the better space fleet pew pews. Sad to see this going. Guess their license expired. That leaves `X4` BSG mods and `Diaspora` (`FreeSpace 2 Open` mod), of course. Speaking of: There isn’t much talk about `Diaspora` but apparently they are cooking another campaign behind the curtains.