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What went wrong with wireless USB

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#131

Post by brookst »

mort96 wrote: post #47
phire wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that…

At this point, the decision to add Bluetooth or not is literally just a product decision. If you don't want Bluetooth in your product, you actively have to disable the Bluetooth part of your WiFi chip, because you can't really get a WiFi chip without Bluetooth.

All of the BT+wifi chips I’ve worked with require active initialization of each feature; you have to signal the chip (over i2c or SPI or whatever) with what kind of BT operations you want.

No BT stack in your product, no BT radio initialization, no BT/wifi multiplexing. At least in the (admittedly limited) chips I’ve worked with.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#132

Post by seltzered_ »

phire wrote: post #107
miki123211 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days Don't forget music piracy. At least over here, a lot of kids had phones that did Bluetooth, and the primary use case for it was sharing songs they liked with each other. You could use infrared (IRDA) for that, and some people did before Bluetooth was common, but it was much slower. This was mostly on low-end Nokias, maybe with a bit of Sony Ericsson thrown i…

By "early days", I was more thinking about the 1999-2005 era, before low-end Nokias even got Bluetooth and the ability to play MP3s. The wireless headset was the killer app that drove bluetooth adoption within cellphones, driving down costs until eventually the lower-end models receiving it too. While sharing files was possible in the 1999-2005 era (especially with PDAs), most phones were lacking enough flash storage…

It may be worth articulating the Bluetooth headset specifically as the one-ear little clip headset executives and IT staff seemed to use to answer calls.

Remember companies like jawbone?

I vaguely remember a cultural stereotype of bmw drivers driving aggressively and wearing Bluetooth headsets. [edit: this is the clip https://youtu.be/UqfAMvXpSw4?t=25 from top gear of jeremy clarkson wearing a bluetooth headset in sunglasses in a bmw, supposedly from topgear season 10, episode 10]

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#133

Post by 7373737373 »

kensai wrote: post #5

The standard of "wireless USB" was there, but probably as in any standards war, moved too slowly and had less to offer than competing standards. Are we not better off with Wifi and Bluetooth now? Btw, is there a direct comparison anywhere regarding energy consumption of the competing standards in real situations?

Bluetooth is so terrible that you can't even use headphones with high quality audio while also using their microphone. In 2025. It's pathetic.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#134

Post by gruturo »

LtWorf wrote: post #103
gruturo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm frankly baffled at all these reports of IR being unreliable and slow. It... wasn't. Not for the file sizes of the day. I exchanged plenty of files back in the day, even at 115200bps a picture would be 2-3 seconds tops (pictures were small!). And when devices started supporting 4Mbps, even a large-ish MP3 would go in 5-6 seconds. All without setup or pairing, beautiful. Huge files (like full resolution pictures fr…

It would take me like 30 minutes to transfer 1MB.

At 9600bps. Almost every device supported 115200 - that would cut it down to to 72 seconds. And as I mentioned - pictures were often small (20-30kbytes) back in the day - that's barely 1-2 seconds at 115200. And the later 4Mbps speeds would move that megabyte in 2 seconds flat.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#135

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

phire wrote: post #41
nurettin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.

Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that…

Bluetooth was the main way to transfer music from dumbphone to a dumbphone

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#136

Post by justsomehnguy »

pwg wrote: post #127
tehbeard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't mean the absolute real distance between dongle and mouse. They mean the mouse communicates an absolute position (relative to some arbitrary 0,0 the mouse decides upon) instead of a relative direction. Dongle can then take latest coord packet and diff it against previous coord packet to get a relative coord to pass via HID to the system. If the RF packets are lost, some latency occurs but the dongle still h…

What happens with that "absolute position relative to some arbitrary 0,0 picked by the mouse" when the user picks the mouse up off the table/pad/etc. and repositions it (i.e., they hit the edge of the pad and now "re-center" to continue moving left (or right) on screen). The mouse loses its 0,0 point reference as soon as it is picked up. It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception…

> It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception of that packet becomes critical to continuing to properly communicate motion to the attached computer.

And those "how I would have designed a wireless mouse protocol" guys are back at the square one.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#137

Post by marcosdumay »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #93
phire wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that…

> the wireless headset was the killer app [for Bluetooth] in its early days But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for t…

Except for the "headphone" versus "headset" mode dichotomy that is inherent to Bluetooth, all those other issues are due to stupid product decisions that most OSes do to themselves independently on the same way.

If you use Linux + KDE, you can still use any microphone or headphone, many at the same time, or in whatever mode you want.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#138

Post by myself248 »

ElFitz wrote: post #71

We were a bit late when we discovered wireless USB had been a thing. Still, we managed to find one pair of emitter and receiver that also transmitted HDMI, power the "receiver" side with a battery, in a backpack, and hook it up with another power bank to an Oculus DK1. Unexpectedly, battery time was never an issue. The WUSB chip in the receiver would overheat long before that and start throttling, leading to jittery…

Seems like you could spend a smidgen of that battery power on a fan, no?

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#139

Post by bombela »

marcosdumay wrote: post #137
thaumasiotes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the wireless headset was the killer app [for Bluetooth] in its early days But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for t…

Except for the "headphone" versus "headset" mode dichotomy that is inherent to Bluetooth, all those other issues are due to stupid product decisions that most OSes do to themselves independently on the same way. If you use Linux + KDE, you can still use any microphone or headphone, many at the same time, or in whatever mode you want.

Linux + KDE user here.

It used to work on kde/plasma 5 at some point. And after a minor version update it stopped working.

Now the mic of my headset doesn't work because KDE insists that only the high quality sound output without mic is available. The mic + low quality output is gone from the settings.

Lucky for me this update also brought proper handling of the stereo positioned noise cancelling microphones on my thinkpad. So now I can actually enjoy the luxury of built-in microphones that work. Until the day it wont I guess.

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