Interestingly, the 2017 Essential Phone used wireless USB for the data communication to its magnetically-attached/powered modular accessories. (Of which the only released one was a 360° camera.)
What went wrong with wireless USB
151–160 of 219 posts
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#152I worked on the design of wireless USB chips around 2008 - 2010. They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. I would say the major problem it had with adoption was that wired USB also provided power . (A lot more people use usb to charge their phone than to sync their phone.) So great - wireless connectivity... but you still have to plug the device into a ca…
> They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. TFA mentions that contemporary users of these things didn't get anywhere near Hi-Speed USB speeds. The author's present-day testing agrees with these reports, finding that at least one device's maximum performance was just barely better than USB FullSpeed. If you were seeing 480Mbit performance with the hardware…
The product in the article I think it said came from 2006? Not based on the chips I worked on, anyway.
Just like early wifi, there were several companies working on wireless usb chips at the time, and performance could vary a lot depending on who's product you bought, and when.
Here's an article about us I found from 2008.
https://www.eetimes.com/staccato-communications-ultra-wideba...
The "ripcord 2" chips (mentioned) definitely could do 480Mbps at short range. I worked on the design of the next generation after that (equal performance, but lower-cost/lower-power-consumption), which never made it to the commercial market.
"What happened" was the combination of the product/ market mismatch I mentioned above (like, the wireless laptop dock was cool for a demo, but it didn't charge your laptop battery like a regular wired dock would, so it wasn't actually practical for daily use) so we didn't have enough revenue to self- sustain, and the "great recession" meant investment dried up and we eventually just ran out of money.
Staccato merged with a different wireless usb startup to try to delay the inevitable, and then tried to "pivot" to something profoundly stupid and I bailed at that point. (They did an internal demo of the new "product". It was maybe the worst tech demo I've ever seen. I was out 2 weeks later. I think the company dragged on for maybe another year.)
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#153I worked on the design of wireless USB chips around 2008 - 2010. They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. I would say the major problem it had with adoption was that wired USB also provided power . (A lot more people use usb to charge their phone than to sync their phone.) So great - wireless connectivity... but you still have to plug the device into a ca…
> which makes the value proposition a lot less clear. Wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer seems like a big use case. Still no easy standard way of doing it.
Transferring files between a phone and a computer was a real use case, but since wireless usb was "exactly like regular usb but no wires" it wasn't any easier to set up file transfer than regular usb (harder, actually, since you had to do the wireless bonding), and wired usb would charge your phone battery while the files transferred whereas wireless usb would drain it.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like you could spend a smidgen of that battery power on a fan, no?
[I am not a physicist] Wouldn’t a fan in a backpack just move hot air including the heat of its motor?
Yes, it will move the hot air, but typically the temperature of the chip is substantially higher than the ambient air inside the enclosure (be it a backpack or a laptop shell or anything else.) Furthermore, even if the backpack is 100% sealed, by raising its temperature you significantly increase the amount of heat that the backpack rejects.
A quick Google says that the Oculus DK1 used ~3W, and you can easily find a fan that uses a fraction of a watt to move a reasonable amount of air, so this would probably have worked out.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#155I worked on the design of wireless USB chips around 2008 - 2010. They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. I would say the major problem it had with adoption was that wired USB also provided power . (A lot more people use usb to charge their phone than to sync their phone.) So great - wireless connectivity... but you still have to plug the device into a ca…
> but you still have to plug the device into a cable at some point
That may explain why I can't find a 5 Gbps wireless USB extender for my work web cam.
https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/18983/wirel...
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
[I am not a physicist] Wouldn’t a fan in a backpack just move hot air including the heat of its motor?
Yes, it will move the hot air, but typically the temperature of the chip is substantially higher than the ambient air inside the enclosure (be it a backpack or a laptop shell or anything else.) Furthermore, even if the backpack is 100% sealed, by raising its temperature you significantly increase the amount of heat that the backpack rejects. A quick Google says that the Oculus DK1 used ~3W, and you can easily find a…
Fans reduce sensible heat because humans have evaporative cooling.
A backpack is pretty much a closed system and chips use convective cooling.
Adding a fan won’t create a positivee pressure gradient between the backpack and outside world but will add 3 or more watts of heat to the closed system.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is position estimation from the signal that accurate for that?
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…
That sounds like a software problem to me, not one that requires a hardware solution. There is nothing in what you describe that cannot be performed through bluetooth packets.
I am not sure which dongles make these corrections, but my experience with dongles is worse than bluetooth. Typically, a mouse is very close to the bluetooth antenna of a computer, and I have not really experienced any sort of connection issues due to missing packages etc. In contrast, I have had tons of issues with usb dongles due to usb interference.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#158Earlier 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…
The absolute madness that is Bluetooth pairing between cars and cellphones is wild. If I get into my car and it decides to randomly pair with my wife's phone (who is inside the house) and I drive off, the whole infotainment system is locks up and dies until I get to my destination and turn off the car.
What car do you drive? Then I make sure to not buy it
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#159Earlier 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…
how to use a phone in car without headset / bluetooth to talk legally?
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#160Earlier 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…
It is happening because it works the way that is most useful to most people. The number of people who want to use bluetooth earbuds with a different microphone is line noise in the consumer market. Implementing special requirements is always inconvenient for users because no B2C wants to risk bad the-microphone-didn’t-work reviews, customer returns, and support tickets. Nevermind coordinating with arbitrary USB micro…
> It is happening because it works the way that is most useful to most people. The number of people who want to use bluetooth earbuds with a different microphone is line noise in the consumer market.
I don't think you have any idea what you're saying. The scenario I'm describing is when you want to use a bluetooth headset that includes a microphone. Using a different microphone is how you solve the problem.