Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What went wrong with wireless USB

oldvcr.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 219 posts

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#201

Post by frollogaston »

frollogaston wrote: post #178
freehorse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost Doesn't the same problem exist for USB dongles with proprietary RF protocols? Logi Bolt is a good solution. But ime most other USB dongles are terrible. I have had a lot of bad connection issues with such USB dongles, and never with similar bluetooth devices. USB dongles also use the same 2.4GHz band, and even more they are prone to inter…

In all the years I've used wireless dongled mice, I've never had an issue. And all my stuff is bottom of the barrel unbranded from eBay or Amazon. Bluetooth mice and keyboards always have trouble pairing, or there's input lag, or sometimes I can't use them to wake the computer. And if you ever want to hold a startup key...

Clarification, the dongled mice are cheapo, the Bluetooth mice are expensive and still bad.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#202

Post by hmry »

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…

That's not how mouse input works though, right? If I move my mouse cursor to 10,10, and then pick up the mouse and set it down somewhere else, it's still at coordinates 10,10. You don't need the mouse's physical absolute position, but just the cursor position (which is the sum of all the relative movements)

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#203

Post by kasabali »

m000 wrote: post #106

Could wireless USB be a case of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"? [1] I.e. the effort was driven by the USB-IF [2] that happens to be more hardware than software oriented. So they were eager to deliver a solution based around a new chipset that could be adopted immediately by anyone interested. This failed to account for adoption friction/lag, and the era of ARM-based SBCs and WiFi prolifer…

I have a similar pet peeve with Miracast, though sources say over ethernet support was added to later Windows versions.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#205

Post by ElFitz »

owenversteeg wrote: post #169
brudgers wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you even read my comment? I have designed cooling systems professionally and I can assure you that is how things work :) Not trying to be rude, but your comment is incorrect in several ways. I'll make this very simple: The hot chip is warmer than the ambient air because the rate of heat transfer from the chip to the air is low. A fan will increase the rate of heat transfer, thus decreasing the temperature of the…

Very interesting, thanks!

Same thing for fans in a desktop case, a laptop case, or on a graphics card. They cool down the CPU / GPU / desk to case even when said computer is in a closed room.

Hadn’t thought of it this way, but it’s kind of obvious when you think of it. Would most likely have helped.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#206

Post by thaumasiotes »

brudgers wrote: post #195
thaumasiotes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have never had a microphone problem with a bluetooth headset. They all always just work until something mechanical breaks through use. If I had an issue, wired headphones seem a simpler solution than changing the bluetooth standard and more likely to work than wishing manufacturers changed their devices.

So, the standard defines behavior that is obviously pathological, actively working against the needs of all users. But because it's already codified, it's a bad idea to change it?

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#207

Post by thaumasiotes »

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.

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

This doesn't really seem to respond to the problem. The problem is that I'd like to use a single bluetooth device that includes earpieces and a microphone. That doesn't work, because of the headphone-headset mode dichotomy. As I replied to another comment, using multiple devices would be a solution to the problem. It wouldn't be an example of the problem that I want solved.

Bluetooth is apparently incapable of simply delivering an audio stream to the earpieces while accepting one from the microphone. This is a baffling design. The assumption appears to be that there will never be more than one source of audio for output. But that's crazy.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#208

Post by rajnathani »

nurettin wrote: post #15
variaga wrote: post #10

I 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…

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

Maybe the low-power feature of Bluetooth helped it, such as with the Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) spec that with the way "services" and "characteristics" are defined that it allows for extremely low power consumption when no read-operation is done and thus the Bluetooth radio power can be minimized. Also, the 2.4 GHz band of Bluetooth is inherently less power consuming than the higher frequency band of Wireless USB.

But I guess the other problems may have been due to as the OP article brings up about it being in a different frequency communication band. Bluetooth on the other hand shares the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz (which is also the OG Wi-Fi frequency band)). Thus for PC and mobile device OEMs, it is one less antenna to integrate. Furthermore, the higher frequency of the band would have made through-walls and further-distance communication less reliable. In this context, one of the few cool applications of wireless USB would've been a wireless keyboard or mouse (but this is coming from someone who is working on an OEM computer keyboard and mouse).

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#209

Post by brudgers »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #206
brudgers wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never had a microphone problem with a bluetooth headset. They all always just work until something mechanical breaks through use. If I had an issue, wired headphones seem a simpler solution than changing the bluetooth standard and more likely to work than wishing manufacturers changed their devices.

So, the standard defines behavior that is obviously pathological, actively working against the needs of all users. But because it's already codified, it's a bad idea to change it?

Works for my needs.

If it didn't, I'd use wires.

Or something else.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#210

Post by numpad0 »

ddingus wrote: post #171
numpad0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth FTP was widely supported until ~2009. All Nokia phones and many flip phones had it. iPhone did not, AOSP technically did, but carrier phones often had it disabled, and it slowly disappeared. Windows 11 still supports it, I think macOS too. Pairing is technically optional.

It does and I managed it recently. It was painful. I had to pair, or at least I think I did. Was fetching a file. off a flip phone. Doing these things without "file" gets weird quick. I also seem to recall an awesome Bluetooth control panel applet I used a few times in Windows XP. At the time I had a pretty spiffy Moto flip phone. It could be the computer keyboard, handle audio play and record and more. Pretty sure t…

aw. it hurts my brain to think about those days somehow. An awesome panel must be BlueSoleil. There were Microsoft XP SP2 stack that were stable but featureless, Toshiba stack with (IIRC)SCMS-T DRM support, WIDCOMM stack that show up on search now but I had no experience with - apparently tied to specific dongles, and the IVT BlueSoleil stack with the orange sun floating against dark blue background.

BlueSoleil was by far the most feature complete, and, as far as my interests back then were concerned, required for Wiimote on Windows. It was (not really)available as trialware but interoperability wasn't guaranteed so you would have had to pull dongle lottery until you hit a product with reasonably stable build of BlueSoleil if you had in mind a specific task to do in Bluetooth.

Fun times... things do feel less robust these days. Software was much better tested back then.

Post reply on HN