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Im writing this for a friend because he refuses to do it, says "there's no point doing that as the warranty is out" but I'm more optimist so I'm posting anyway, just in case.

The guy's track IR 4 Pro just stopped working for no apparent reason while hosting a game of IL-2 Sturmovik 1946 modded (I was in the same game as client)

The game froze suddenly but the OS didn't, so he restarted the computer from the Start menu. When it came back up, the Track IR camera was compltely dead, the LEDs were off, and no Track IR was detected in the Device Manager.

- Device connected directly to the USB port on the motherboard (no hub)
- OS is Win32 XP Pro
- Unplugging the Track IR camera and plugging it in again didnt help
- Restarting the Track IR software (v.4) didnt help either
- Reinstalled the software, still no changes
- Tested on a different machine: same results. LEDs off, not detected on Device Manager.

Trying to figure out if the game brought Track IR down or the other way around, I set up my copy of IL-2 exactly the same way as my friend had it when it crashed, I activated the same mods, and ran the game: it worked without a problem, so I *guess* that the game crashed because TrackIR suddenly died, but OTOH that's just a guess.

That is all the info I have right now. I could try to convince the guy to mail Support with his device's serial number if that could help.



The obvious question is there is any way to fix it, or at least to understand what happened in order to try and fix it.

Unfortunately, if the device is not detected on a second system, you are more than likely looking at some type of USB hardware failure on the device. With that type of failure there isn't anyway to repair it, as it could come down to several issues on the board, and the cost of a repair would be more expensive than a new one.

Ouch.
Thanks for the answer, anyway.
just out of curiosity, how "normal" is that? I mean, how long should we expect a Track Ir camera to last, on average?
The camera that I was talking about was three years old. Could we say that it did its job, or "died young"?

Also, a question that's been bugging me is, could a misconfigured game have 'fried' the Track IR camera?
The game froze suddenly and after reboot the camera was dead, and we were running an experimental mods configuration. Could that have killed the camera? Or it's more like the camera just died because "they do that, sometimes", and that brought the game down?

The experimental configuration had to do with AI behavior, the only input mod was the old trusty 6DoF for IL-2 that has been around for years.

That question is kind of important for me because I'm the one who came up with that experimental configuration, and if it turns out that it might have killed the Track IR camera it would be fair to at least contribute to the purchase of a new one.

There should be no game setting, that is going to effect the actual hardware components themselves.

However, if the PCs power supply isn't sufficient for video card (or the video card fan ducts become clogged making the video card fan draw more power) then it may be possible for a game which heavily taxes the video card to cause system power problems. The problems sometimes manifest as pixels stuck, driver failures, blue screens or reboots. It is very unlikely, but the resulting power problems could affect other devices connected to the computer.

The standard device length can vary - I have some users that are still using 8 year old cameras. The devices themselves have a 1 year hardware warranty

Please correct me if I got it wrong: If I understand correctly and not "hearing what I want to hear", it seems that my experimental configuration probably didnt fry the camera, as it doesnt change the video load and there were no warning signs such as stuck pixels or BSOD.

Also, some cameras last relatively long, compared to other computer hardware, but a camera that dies after 3 years is within the norm.

I guess it was just bad luck then.
Thanks for answering.

That is correct