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What went wrong with wireless USB

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#211

Post by numpad0 »

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...

Nintendo Wii Remote used almost completely bare standard HID over Bluetooth Classic and it just worked flawlessly. It needed Wiimote aware apps and special procedures for use with non-Wii devices but it had none such problems(I've had those too) in gaming. It could wake up consoles too.

The problem is in 5W1Hs between combinations of (Windows, PC, Bluetooth), not the protocol. How should pairing keys be retained, etc.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#212

Post by numpad0 »

freehorse wrote: post #42
hmry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proprietary protocol can use absolute positions between device/dongle, and then the dongle can translate to relative positions at the edge, by returning the difference since the last poll

Is position estimation from the signal that accurate for that?

No, mice sensors are far from being SoTA linear encoders. They return approximate instantaneous movements somehow when read request is received. Mouse controller chips(USB or RF or Bluetooth) pack and report up the movements, that's it.

(psa: none of Chinese ADNS-2610 clones have the raw pixel output debug command. Maybe security implications or maybe something else, either way, mouse-as-microscope hacks don't work on sensors extracted from e-wastes)

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#213

Post by ddingus »

numpad0 wrote: post #210
ddingus wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Yeah that seems familiar. One night on business travel, I decided to just play with the setup and really thought highly of it all.

Then some years passed, I got a Blackberry Curve, then a Note 4 and by the time I looked back at Bluetooth. I HATED IT. Still do, though I am grudgingly working through basics, phone call, play audio, etc and the whole time looking at my still wire capable hardware thinking "not yet"

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#214

Post by pwg »

hmry wrote: post #202
pwg wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> That's not how mouse input works though, right?

No, mouse input data does not work that way.

My reply was referring to @tehbeard's suggestion that the mouse could be modified to send absolute coordinates instead, and I was pointing out a reason why that modification would not work out so well.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#215

Post by BenjiWiebe »

torginus wrote: post #82
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.

Introducing a new wireless protocol is incredibly difficult. You basically have to have all the countries in the world to give you a chunk of their spectrum. You have 2 mainstream protocols now, one for low energy, slow data transfers (Bluetooth) and one for fast, but more power hungry devices. I don't see the usecase for UWB.

And as far as I know, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth didn't have frequency given to them. They instead used frequencies that were already available for unlicensed use.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#216

Post by 486sx33 »

seltzered_ wrote: post #132
phire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

Jabra! In all seriousness the blackberry Bluetooth earpiece was the killer app (hardware / device).

BlackBerry HS-655 Bluetooth Headset

Worked perfectly paired with a bb.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#217

Post by simoncion »

variaga wrote: post #152
simoncion wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (mentione…

Ah. Nothing went wrong between the demo table and the finished product; the author is working with Mk. 1 products.

Thanks much for the additional detailed background information. Sorry to hear about the slow demise of your former employer.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#218

Post by frollogaston »

numpad0 wrote: post #211
frollogaston wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Nintendo Wii Remote used almost completely bare standard HID over Bluetooth Classic and it just worked flawlessly. It needed Wiimote aware apps and special procedures for use with non-Wii devices but it had none such problems(I've had those too) in gaming. It could wake up consoles too. The problem is in 5W1Hs between combinations of (Windows, PC, Bluetooth), not the protocol. How should pairing keys be retained, etc…

Yeah the cross-platform situation makes things hard, but in a way it's the protocol's fault if it's hard to agree on things.

Also, I really remember Wiimotes failing to pair a lot of the time, but it was so long ago that I could be wrong. All I know for sure is last time I was at someone's house and they wanted to play Switch, it took like 10 minutes to get the controllers set up, but most of that was bad UI.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#219

Post by redeeman »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #192
Dylan16807 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and allows significantly higher latency that you wouldnt accept on a call That latency is also a millstone. We can do much better, but the standard lags and implementations lag even more.

My personal bluetooth ear clips do something much worse than adding latency - if they're not currently playing something, and a sound is supposed to come through, they omit the beginning of the sound while they get ready to become active or whatever it is they're doing. Just delaying the sound and playing all of it would be a big improvement. (Though that would fail badly for watching videos. That's something that us…

well you wont get any argument from me that things could be significantly better.

> why is latency OK there? It isn't.

well.. if you listen to music, you probably dont care too much, but if you're talking to someone, you do.

whats much worse is also that latency is not constant.

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