[HN Gopher] What went wrong with wireless USB
___________________________________________________________________
What went wrong with wireless USB
Author : goldenskye
Score : 301 points
Date : 2025-05-04 02:03 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This was so cool to go over.
|
| It does seem to be missing a pretty significant era though?
| There's 802.11ad (2011) / 802.11ay (2021) / wigig.
|
| It's mainly known for video, and is used today for VR headsets.
| But there's a huge variety of 802.11ad docks out there that also
| have USB, mostly about a decade old now! Intel's tri-band 17265
| (2015) was semi popular in the day as the supporting
| wifi+wigig+bt host adapter, works with many of these docks.
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/86451/i...
|
| I've definitely considered buying a dock & wigig mpcie card &
| test driving this all! Price was way out of reach for me at the
| time, and I expect the performance caveats (range, speed,
| latency) are significant, but it could potentially genuinely help
| me run less cables around the office & the patio, and that would
| be cool. Afaik though there's no Linux support though, so I
| haven't tried.
|
| Not UWB focused (but could work over IP capable UWB systems) I'd
| love to see more usb-ip systems emerge. It works pretty well for
| DIY (and kind of has for multiple decades now), but
| productization & standardization of flows feels hopeless, &
| worse, feels like anyone who knows up is likely to do the wrong
| thing & make something proprietary or with nasty hooks.
| https://usbip.sourceforge.net
|
| And not USB specific, but pretty cool that the briefly mentioned
| 802.15.4 group continues to have some neat & ongoingly advancing
| 6-9GHz UWB work. IEEE 802.15.4ab is expected semi soon. Spark
| Microsystems for example recently announced an incredibly low
| power SR1120 transciever, good for up to 40mbps, capable of very
| low latency. It'd be lovely to see this used somehow for
| generic/universal peripheral interconnect.
| https://www.hackster.io/news/spark-microsystems-unveils-its-...
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) Funny you should mention, because a couple other
| people also mentioned this to me after I posted it. Sadly, I
| don't have any of those devices here, but I added a footnote to
| the article about them.
| Liftyee wrote:
| Interesting to read about the (literal) bandwidth limitations on
| data rates. It's something I've been aware of but not fully
| understood for a long time. "Why can't you just turn the wave on
| and off faster", etc...
| bestham wrote:
| Instead of talking about the fundamentals like Fourier
| transforms, Shannon/Nyquist and wave propagation i usually
| refer to human speech: how increasing the rate of speech
| (signalling rate) comes with 1) substantial reduction in
| transmitting distance as the environment affects signal quality
| and 2) places a higher burden on error correction
| (interpretation of language) that is independent of the actual
| ability for the transmitter to create the faster speech.
| kensai wrote:
| 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?
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Neither Wifi nor Bluetooth are a 1:1 replacement for wireless
| USB, in that neither allow you to use a standard USB device
| without a wired path between the device and host.
|
| In theory, Bluetooth ought to be the replacement for most use
| cases, and would simply require replacing your USB devices with
| Bluetooth devices. In practice, Bluetooth is still kind of
| terrible, so I'm tempted to say any alternative timeline where
| something else won the personal area network war would probably
| be better.
|
| We still kind of do wireless USB, in that the standard for
| wireless mouse and keyboards is still not Bluetooth, but a
| dedicated USB dongle that ships with the device. Such options
| are available for wireless headsets as well, although Bluetooth
| seems to winning in that niche.
| kensai wrote:
| It used to be the case that BT was terrible, but in the last
| few years I have increasingly stable device connections.
| Could it be they simply ironed out the bugs over the years,
| the standard matured, and also the manufacturers are more
| compliant? It just works for me, no horror stories. And BT LE
| is indeed low energy.
|
| Btw, do you have any other suspected reason (politics aside)
| that wireless USB did not catch on?
| usrusr wrote:
| The real change is that BT LE isn't just about low energy.
| That might have actually been the original intention, but
| in practice it is so good beyond that core area of
| competence that it has also displaced classic Bluetooth in
| fields like audio streaming, connections beyond strictly
| PAN distance and so on. And it will only get better as more
| remnants of Old Bluetooth are disappearing from devices,
| that have been retained for backwards compatibility.
| sholladay wrote:
| Better off with Bluetooth is something I never thought anyone
| would say.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Bluetooth is bad enough that wireless mice/keyboards usually
| have a USB dongle receiving what I guess is a proprietary RF
| protocol. Some wireless headphones have that too. And wifi
| requires too much power.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Bluetooth isn't too bad, Logitech Bolt is based on BLE and
| it's just fine. Bigger problem is integration into x86/x86_64
| platform.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Bluetooth mice use the HID protocol borrowed from USB,
| except with Bluetooth as carrier. But HID had not been
| designed for the possibility that packets could get lost:
| it sends movements as a relative vector since the previous
| packet.
|
| I don't know how Logi Bolt works, but Logitech has claimed
| that it should work better than BLE when the 2.4 GHz band
| is congested. Also that it would have better security than
| BLE.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I mean, you can't type in BitLocker password wirelessly
| without a dongle. Optical mice sensors aren't so
| repeatable anyway, so missing a packet or two probably
| aren't so critical.
| freehorse wrote:
| > 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 interference from
| nearby active USB ports [0]. If you have ever had a
| "jumping" mouse while transfering big amounts of data
| through a port neighbouring your mouse's USB dongle, this
| is likely the reason.
|
| [0] https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf
| hmry wrote:
| 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
| freehorse wrote:
| Is position estimation from the signal that accurate for
| that?
| tehbeard wrote:
| 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 has the previous mouse coord and can make a
| fairly accurate correction once a packet gets thru (get's
| from A to D, but might skip points B+C).
| pwg wrote:
| 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 of that packet becomes critical
| to continuing to properly communicate motion to the
| attached computer.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Precisely. That is how I would have designed a wireless
| mouse protocol: using wrapping counters and sending the
| counter values. The HID protocol does not support an
| input value that is Absolute/Wrap (although it could be
| extended to do so, and I think that it should)
|
| I'd think it would also be possible to get around
| congestion problems by using tricks such as multiple
| channels and/or interference detection on top of BLE. But
| only Logitech knows how Bolt actually works.
| frollogaston wrote:
| 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...
| akvadrako wrote:
| Bolt can't be better than BLE because it is BLE. Same
| with Apple gear which pairs so seemlessly.
|
| It's just that they control both sides of the signal so
| can better optimize the connection.
| freehorse wrote:
| I don't know why USB dongles are popular for manufacturers (I
| assume to make their product more plug-and-play friendly),
| but I don't think they are a better solution than bluetooth.
| For example, it is common that if another USB device is
| plugged close to a USB dongle, it can cause interference to
| it, which results to unstable connection and eg makes a mouse
| "jump", keystrokes not register etc. Finding the right place
| for a USB dongle can be a pain. USB dongles with proprietary
| RF protocols are usually a terrible solution imo. I have
| never had any similar kind of connectivity issues with a
| bluetooth mouse or keyboard.
| notfed wrote:
| Bluetooth's latency is just too slow for a mouse. Heck,
| Bluetooth is too slow for audio, too, but most people seem
| to be complacent to latency.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's fine for any use of a keyboard or mouse besides a
| niche in gaming. It also uses less energy than most RF
| dongles, which results in better battery life (something
| I could check using a couple of mice that could do both).
|
| The fact that Logitech's current dongles are just BLE
| with a fancy encryption scheme tends to indicate that
| they really want their proprietary hardware, and
| bandwidth is not the reason.
| m000 wrote:
| USB dongles are popular because the mouse is paired with
| the dongle. This comes handy in a number of use-cases
| (servicing a different computer, hot-desk office, non tech-
| inclined people).
|
| It is true though that USB interference for wireless
| dongles is an annoying reality. My Logitech Unifying dongle
| has issues whenever I copy files over USB. I'm not sure if
| later revisions or their Bolt dongles have improved on
| that.
| bramhaag wrote:
| Some things are difficult to do with a Bluetooth keyboard:
| you cannot do anything before the OS is booted, such as
| changing BIOS settings, installing an OS, or choosing a
| GRUB boot entry. There are workarounds (buying a Bluetooth
| adapter that can act as a HID proxy) but for me this is
| enough of a reason to not want to rely on Bluetooth.
| brudgers wrote:
| The dongles are common because they predate widespread
| availability of bluetooth equipped laptops and desktops by
| about a decade...00's versus 10's.
|
| Dongles are also plug and play (no pairing dance) and more
| readily support multiple devices on the same computer.
|
| Bluetooth has gotten better over the years but it doesn't
| provide a meaningfully better alternative for the it-aint-
| broke consumer mouse market.
| frollogaston wrote:
| I bought a new mouse recently and intentionally got a
| dongle one, not that it was hard to find. It's just
| better.
| troupo wrote:
| > Are we not better off with Wifi and Bluetooth now?
|
| Bluetooth is a nightmare of a standard. Up until very recently
| even pairing two devices was a non-deterministic operation.
| Apple went as far as creating their own chip with their own
| protocol for their headphones just not to have to deal with
| bluetooth.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| 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.
| begueradj wrote:
| Impressive. It sounds to be a thorough summary of Wirth's work.
| variaga wrote:
| 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_ cable at some point (or have replaceable
| batteries), which makes the value proposition a lot less clear.
|
| Beyond that it suffered from the usual adoption chicken-and-egg
| problem. Laptop manufacturers didn't want to add it because it
| was an expense that didn't drive sales since there weren't any
| must-have peripherals that used it, and peripheral manufacturers
| didn't want to make wireless usb devices since they couldn't be
| used with a standard laptop (at least not without a WUSB dongle -
| which raised the cost).
|
| Still, very fun stuff to work on.
| nurettin wrote:
| I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must
| have something to do with marketing.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| yes-and-no.
|
| In my opinion, this was the timing and usefulness of
| Bluetooth in an era when only Nokia ruled the world.
| Moreover, there are many other reasons too.
| designerarvid wrote:
| Largest phone manufacturers of the time (Ericsson and Nokia)
| supporting and developing it surely helped.
| msh wrote:
| Bluetooth took off before wireless usb did and was allready
| useful to people when wusb came a long. It was also lower
| power so you could do peripherals that was smaller and longer
| lived.
| phire wrote:
| 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 point, the BOM cost to add Bluetooth to a laptop or
| smart device became essentially zero, why not include it?
| Modern smartphones with both Bluetooth and Wifi arrived at
| around the same time (I suspect these combo chipsets were
| originally developed for handheld devices, and laptops
| benefited)
|
| And once Bluetooth was mainstream, we saw a steady rise in
| devices using Bluetooth.
|
| WUSB operates on a completely different set of frequencies
| and technology and couldn't share hardware with WiFi. Maybe
| it could have taken off if there was a killer app, but there
| never was.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > 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 into the mix. They definitely did not have
| WiFi, in fact, Nokia even tried to limit internet over
| Bluetooth for usual carrier monopoly reasons as far as I'm
| aware, but Bluetooth was definitely there.
|
| For many here, the iPhone not doing file and ringtone
| sharing over Bluetooth was one of its main limitations, at
| least early on. It was a social network in its own way, and
| having a device that couldn't participate in it was no fun.
| palata wrote:
| > Don't forget music piracy.
|
| What you describe is file sharing, not necessarily piracy
| :-). Just nitpicking, I understand what you mean of
| course!
| rikafurude21 wrote:
| Wow this unlocked a bunch of memories from middle school
| where we would send each other the latest songs and games
| via bluetooth. I remember pirating games for my sony
| ericsson and sharing them with my friends and we would
| play these games in class. You could just share and
| install the .jar files. Good times
| phire wrote:
| 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 to store anything worthwhile.
|
| While I don't want to say file sharing wasn't a killer
| app, it does seem to have been limited to just schools
| during a certain time period.
|
| A time period that I missed out on by a few years. At
| high school, we did all our file sharing by swapping
| burned CDs. Then we switched to dragging around laptops
| and USB hard drives at university (and using the private
| emule network on the university wired ethernet).
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 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]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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
| there to even be two different modes.
|
| Why is this still happening?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| bombela wrote:
| 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.
| redeeman wrote:
| if you use pipewire it works fine both in plasma 5 and 6.
|
| but the audio quality in the sound + mic profile is very
| poor, the codec is only meant for speech
| bombela wrote:
| I am using pipe wire. The option to select the handset
| mode is gone! I can only select the various output codecs
| with my increasing quality. But not the mic & output
| mode. It's gone from the list...
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| roywashere wrote:
| What car do you drive? Then I make sure to not buy it
| brudgers wrote:
| 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 microphone
| latency...I've got one with 250ms of it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| redeeman wrote:
| it happens because bluetooth profile for audio+microphone
| uses different codecs and has less bandwidth, due to
| being used for realtime communication.
|
| the bluetooth audio streaming profile enables more
| codecs, but only playback, and allows significantly
| higher latency that you wouldnt accept on a call
| jonesjohnson wrote:
| obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/
| terribleperson wrote:
| My partner's hearing aid connects (via some radio
| protocol) to a device that then connects via bluetooth.
| Unfortunately, it presents itself as a headset, which
| causes... problems. For Android, they have to use an app
| from the play store that presents itself as an audio
| device and then sends that to the 'headset'.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The ironic thing is the Bluetooth ignored it's audio use as
| much as possible for as long as possible. They wanted it to
| be used for tracking shoppers in stores...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Bluetooth was the main way to transfer music from dumbphone
| to a dumbphone
| skirge wrote:
| how to use a phone in car without headset / bluetooth to
| talk legally?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly
| sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared.
|
| IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at
| the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the
| early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be
| desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was
| still a _massive_ improvement on what came before.
|
| Wireless USB wasn't a significant enough improvement to
| Bluetooth given that BT was already ubiquitous by that point,
| but also cheap and (by that point) battery efficient now too.
| m4rtink wrote:
| IR with palm devices was super nice - just point to the
| other device and send, then confirm on the other. No
| persistent pairing bullshit & you could also use it to
| control TVs.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's how BT originally worked too but it got abused (I
| touched on this in my original comment when I said BT was
| insecure). The paring is a security measure to protect
| people from abuse.
|
| Back when BT was new, I used to get all sorts of random
| shit pushed onto my phone every Friday night on the drunk
| train home from London.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I guess that was a lot less of a problem with IRDA as it
| required line-of-sight, which limited the abuse potential
| significantly.
|
| Some devices would even establish an IRDA connection
| automatically as soon as they found anything. I have
| friends whose laptop names have suddenly appeared on
| lecture room projectors, as their laptop's IRDA receiver
| was in direct line of sight of that of the teacher's.
|
| Not that you couldn't do that with Bluetooth, some early
| BT chipsets gave you a "<device name> wants to connect to
| you" dialog box any time somebody tried sending something
| to your device. This could be abused, to great student
| amusement, to display funny messages on that same
| projector if the lecturer's laptop had such a chipset.
| adrianN wrote:
| I wonder why IR is slow. Shouldn't there be plenty of
| bandwidth available at those frequencies?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Not through a tiny photodiode + amp on a spare UART RX,
| if not repurposed TV remote phototransistor. They can be
| slow.
| fragmede wrote:
| These days, professional optical equipment, aka expensive
| lasers+supporting hardware, can do 10-Gbit over multiple
| kilometers through the air, so you're right that optical
| transmission through the air should be able to support
| higher data rates.
|
| The problem with Irda is that it's old. Technology has
| significantly advanced since the 90's, when Irda was
| popular on cellphones, so a modern implementation could
| do better data rates even accounting for the significant
| interference from the environment. We barely had wifi
| back then, and now it'll do a few hundred megabytes per
| second without breaking a sweat (your ISP might though).
| All the technology required to do that didn't exist in
| the 90's. We have Bluetooth now though, so there's that
| same bootstrapping problem, where you'd just use
| Bluetooth, and not spend a bunch of money building a
| system very few people are asking for, so then there's
| little demand for a modern high performance Irda system
| in any devices.
| gnatolf wrote:
| Mostly just SNR issues.
| gruturo wrote:
| 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 from an SLR camera)
| would take a while - but frankly they took almost the
| same time with a cable! You'd just have to plug their
| memory card directly into your computer if you were in a
| hurry.
|
| The only really clunky use case for me was internet
| access - keeping phone and laptop positioned and aligned
| for 30 minutes was limiting.
|
| And yes there IS plenty of bandwidth at those
| frequencies. In fact latest IR standards reach 1Gbps, but
| it's pretty much extinct. There was an attempt called Li-
| Fi to use it for as a wireless networking but I don't
| think it went far.
|
| What I really miss is OBEX (Object Exchange), which
| worked also over Bluetooth, and which Apple sadly chose
| not to implement: simplest protocol to just ship a file
| or a contact vCard over, no setup, just worked - and it's
| been a standard for 20+ years. Early Android had it too,
| it was since dropped I think. Sigh.
| LtWorf wrote:
| It would take me like 30 minutes to transfer 1MB.
| timthorn wrote:
| You were pretty unlucky. The basic bitrate was 9.6kbps
| but much higher speeds were common.
| gruturo wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You're either misremembering things or talking about an
| era after Bluetooth had already taken off.
|
| In the days before Bluetooth, transferring MP3s over IR
| took multiple minutes, even on high end (for the time)
| handsets.
|
| And the fact that you needed to keep line of sight during
| the whole process meant your phone couldn't be used that
| whole time. Which was a real pain in the arse if you got
| a text message or phone call while trying to transfer a
| file.
|
| IR was really more designed for swapping contacts. In
| fact that's exactly how BlackBerry (or was it Palm?)
| marketed IR on their device: a convenient way to swap
| contact details. But you're talking about a few KB vs
| several MBs for an MP3.
|
| The tech has definitely moved on since. But then so has
| Bluetooth, WiFi and GSM et al too.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It was harder to extract a clean signal due to ambient
| environmental conditions.
|
| You could probably solve those issues with modern tech
| though. Things have advanced significantly since IR was
| popular. For example, back then Bluetooth was slow too.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| greatgib wrote:
| In my opinion, for computers, wireless mouse (and eventually
| keyboards) was one of the killer app that showed pushed for
| Bluetooth to be common in computers and laptops. "Not needing
| a dongle" was a huge added value compared to the private
| radio protocol of manufacturers
| GuB-42 wrote:
| My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and
| when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need
| for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by
| Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
|
| It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but
| convincing potential customers to change something that works
| (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we
| are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in
| cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes
| anymore. It is already well established and it works well
| enough as a power outlet.
| adrr wrote:
| Bluetooth took off because it was easiest path to do wireless
| headsets when handsfree driving laws passed.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > 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.
| dtech wrote:
| Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case
| for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped
| up.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Needing to upload files to third party servers just to get
| them onto your personal computer doesn't solve the case. It
| just injects a middleman.
| mycatisblack wrote:
| And only works when you're connected to the internet.
| ahoef wrote:
| How does it not solve the problem? The data shows up on
| the other end. The fact that you don't agree with the
| implementation is a different thing, but it does solve
| the case.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > How does it not solve the problem?
|
| It "solves" it but in a way that's ten times slower and
| fundamentally unreliable.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| For small files maybe. As shocking as it may seem, most
| Dropbox users just have the free version, with very
| limited space. Same for Google Drive or One Drive.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| Dropbox is unavailable to huge populations. also sharing
| private bits with a cloud service should not be necessary
| to transfer files locally between devices. at least user
| level file encryption should become straightforward on a
| mobile device which it is not today.
| dirkt wrote:
| But that doesn't need new peripherals, I could do that in my
| home WLAN network if they'd just install standard software
| for it on the phone (which you can fix by installing it from
| F-Droid etc.)
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| scp works well for me.
| grumbel wrote:
| That requires having an account on the other machine.
| What's missing is anonymous scp, where the other side just
| opens up a directory, and you can copy into it. One can
| build something like this with rsyncd, but it's not a
| pretty shell one-liner to get it going and it still
| requires both devices to be on the same network.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| What I responded to was "wirelessly transferring files
| between a phone and a computer", assuming that I am the
| user at both ends of the transfer.
|
| If I want to share something with someone else, there's a
| "File Sharing" section in phone's settings that enables
| anonymous WebDAV sharing, and it works fine too. There's
| Bluetooth OBEX too, but that one's fiddly.
| pca006132 wrote:
| There are websites using WebRTC for p2p transfer.
| kmarc wrote:
| I assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN
| cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of
| the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural
| / unknown (younger generation).
|
| They might want to transfer (a better word: share)
| photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use
| specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of
| files), and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).
|
| As long as the entity they want to share magically shows up
| on the another device or at the other person they want to
| share with, they are happy. They just skip two levels of
| abstraction ("this photo is a FILE and I will use USB to
| transfer it"). Maybe a far fetched analogy but this is why
| most of the drivers of an automatic don't really think about
| clutches and how the torque of the engine's output is
| converted.
|
| At least this is my perception (outside the IT bubble)
| afiori wrote:
| I want to add something to this: abandoning the fire layer
| allows for richer custom flows (which to many are arguably
| worse)
|
| For example the file API does not allow a clean, uniform,
| and reliable way to associate a resource with some metadata
| kmarc wrote:
| The file API might not, but all major filesystems
| implemented some kind off Metadata attributes, IIRC
| Microsoft was wanting to heavily rely on that for "user
| space" stuff (e.g. Users leveraging it for semantic
| information about their files)
| palata wrote:
| I don't get that. How do you expect to abandon the file
| layer on your OS? Do you plan on rewriting Windows,
| macOS, Linux, Android and iOS with a fundamentally new
| philosophy?
|
| If not, then you're not abandoning the file layer at all.
| You're just preventing people from benefitting from it.
| ddingus wrote:
| If we don't have files, then what?
|
| Seems to me we very rapidly arrive at records or
| entities.
|
| We see both these days in databases.
|
| Entities show up in CAD and simulation. Records show up
| in business tools of various kinds.
|
| All require a schema and serious dependencies flow from
| there.
|
| In CAD, for example, the database schema can change quite
| dramatically from version to version of the same software
| tool. And all this makes writing plug in tools or
| anything really painful.
|
| And forget exchanging native data between systems. STEP
| exists for that, and O God help you on a bigger project
| involving any old data
|
| The thing about files is they are basically EASY.
|
| And easy, when looking at where we are going, matters. A
| lot.
|
| Files can exist on pretty much anything. Paper tape, mag
| tape, all sorts of media, up to advanced storage tech.
|
| Databases are a different story.
|
| I am not convinced we are anywhere rear being ready for
| that huge leap.
|
| And I would normally say "forward" but on this?
|
| Nope!
|
| It would be a huge mess requiring we toss just about
| everything we have in use today
| consp wrote:
| > and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).
|
| One of my great hate pet peeves with all smartphone and
| cloud apps is the "abstraction" and reliance on search. For
| me folders is quicker and less error prone, and as a bonus
| it saves on unneeded bandwidth (to load previews) and
| computing costs.
|
| Also stop telling me I must use your one off "feature set"
| of sorting and ordering which either nobody uses or copies
| differently. The amount of square wheels (for me I must
| add, ymmv) reinvented is astonishing.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Folders as an abstraction don't really make sense beyond
| documents, though.
|
| If your music is stored in a folder hierarchy, and can,
| in principle, be located anywhere, how do you index it to
| provide a library view? How do you distinguish it from
| random audio files that just happen to be ID3 tagged, but
| which you don't want as part of your permanent music
| collection? How do you efficiently react to deletion
| events? What happens if you delete an entire artist's
| worth of music from your music app? Should it delete the
| files, or only the library entries? If it deletes files,
| what if (some of) that music was in a folder that didn't
| contain any other files? Should that folder be gone too,
| or should you be left with an empty folder or hierarchy?
| What if the folder also contained a .nfo, is it good UX
| if it deletes the music and just leaves the .nfo?
|
| If the only tool you have is a computer, everything is a
| file. If you're a music lover and not a computer
| enthusiast, you tend to think about albums, artists and
| playlists, and that's how you want to view your music
| collection.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| You index it with btrees just like everything else. You
| distinguish it by configuring which folders to watch. You
| react to events with inotify. You don't give your music
| app write permission to your library. It only needs to
| write its indexes and playlists. All of your other
| questions become irrelevant; you delete the files you
| mean to delete with your file manager. In practice, music
| is small and storage is cheap, so deleting seems like a
| weird use-case for an application dedicated to music. I
| still have files that have been migrating across
| computers for 25 years.
| philistine wrote:
| What if I want to look at a list of composers, but the
| folder structure is by artist?
|
| What about playlists?
|
| The limitation of the folder is that there's only one.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it
| however you'd like. I think this is how basically every
| player with a library function works? Like jellyfin loads
| my library in the same structure I've had it for 20
| years, and it gives me various ways to view by name,
| artist, release date, rating, etc. and builds search
| indexes. I just point it to the roots of my libraries.
|
| I said it needs a place to write playlists (or write
| access to your playlist folder(s)).
|
| I wouldn't do it this way, but there can be more than one
| folder containing the same file (hardlinks).
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it
| however you'd like.
|
| Which means the concepts of files and folders becomes
| immaterial. If a music player is only interfacing with a
| database of music metadata it doesn't matter how the
| bytes on disk are organized.
|
| There's a reason there's been 30+ years of file systems
| trying to tack on database functionality (BeFS, WinFS,
| etc) or over the top metadata indexing (Spotlight,
| Lucene, etc) to file systems. The files and folders
| abstraction is not sufficient for non-technical users in
| many cases.
| const_cast wrote:
| The worst is photos, because the search abstraction
| really breaks there. On modern iPhones, it's still a pain
| in the ass to organize photos in such a way where you can
| come back later and find them. I'm still in the "scroll
| through the timeline until you spot it" phase.
|
| Machine Learning is making this better, but ideally
| albums or folders wouldn't be such a pain in the ass to
| actually use in day-to-day life.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I believe in the opposite.
|
| Because we can't transfer easily transfer files between
| devices remotely, we had to get used to do it via apps. And
| so we didn't developed good, local files browsers (esp. for
| media) and companies invested in the cloud UI mostly
| because they could sell the storage and sharing
| capabilities. That was all unnecessary but we're used to
| that now to a point where sharing files is weird.
|
| As a power user happily syncthinging all my files between
| all my devices, I'm sad because files is the easiest thing
| to share, organize, transfer, etc. I wish iOS supported
| this kind apps (full storage access!) as we could avoid the
| many, crazy, Alps specific workarounds just to share some
| stupid files.
|
| And don't confuse the file itself (say, a pirated movie),
| the metadata (IMDb IDs) and the apps UI (Kodi!). Files is
| what we have, we should share files and let anyone pick the
| browser/apl they like for viewing, organizing...)
| kmarc wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I'm totally happy woth files. In
| fact, I'm sometimes a bit annoyed when certain apps'
| entities don't map to files either accidentally or to
| maintain the walled garden on purpose (I'm looking at you
| Google Photos, and the very cumbersome rclone connector
| to it).
|
| On the other hand, I don't mind that full storage access
| is a "pain"; I don't even remember which apps I gave the
| permission to, and I would certainly be angry if my
| syncthinged files would be stolen by other app that went
| vicious.
|
| All that said, as people don't think about their
| documents/photos/any other stuff in their homes as "filed
| items in folders", non-tech people also don't think about
| their digital items as such. And maybe this is alright,
| if the "file-ification" would have been so successful,
| better products would have emerged.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Also, they want to use the same "abstraction" for "sharing
| photos with their friend when they're on holiday in another
| country" versus "sharing photos with that same friend when
| they just got back and are literally sitting next to each
| other."
|
| People don't really internalize that those are two
| different use cases.
|
| Yes there's Airdrop, but I think most people view it as
| more of a "discoverability" solution than a file sharing
| solution. If you met somebody you don't have a number for,
| "okay just Airdrop this to me" is much easier than doing
| the whole song and dance of adding them to contacts and
| sending them an iMessage or finding them on Whats App.
| Whether the actual file transfer part of Airdrop goes over
| the internet or over Bluetooth isn't something most people
| care about, as long as it can discover nearby devices and
| initiate a transfer to them, it's good enough.
| palata wrote:
| I disagree. I find it condescending when techies say "the
| average user doesn't make the difference between sharing
| a file to a device next to them and sharing a file over
| the Internet".
|
| Everybody, and I mean _everybody_ is capable to
| understand that to connect their Bluetooth headset to
| their phone, they do it over Bluetooth. And that to
| connect to the Internet, they can either go over WiFi
| (which is "free") or cellular (which is less "free").
|
| > People don't really internalize that those are two
| different use cases.
|
| We actively keep them ignorant, and then we use their
| ignorance as a justification. I find it sad.
|
| What if we said "People don't want to drive their car
| somewhere, they want to go from A to B. We should prevent
| them from learning how to drive so that they would have
| to pay for our taxis".
| palata wrote:
| I think I disagree with that. This "people don't want
| files, they want to share photos", to me, is what product
| people want to believe. The whole thing has been enforced
| on users and is self-reinforcing: of course if you don't
| show files to users, they will not know what a file is.
|
| Sure, I may be in a photo gallery and I may want to share a
| few photos with a friend who may want those photos to be
| treated as photos (instead of going into a big "Downloads/"
| folder). But it doesn't mean, _at all_ , that the concept
| of file has to disappear to the user. In fact the files
| _still very much do exist on the system_. Product people
| just assume users are stupid, IMHO.
|
| And the thing is: this abstraction (not knowing what a file
| is) doesn't make it faster or more efficient. It just makes
| the user more dependent on their platform and apps. Look at
| backups: product people at Google/Apple will tell you
| "people don't want to backup their files, they want to pay
| us to make sure that they never lose an image".
| Conveniently, it means that people are 1) forced to pay
| _them_ and 2) don 't have control over their own files.
|
| Maybe GenZ/alpha now are stuck with these abstractions
| because they never learned what a file was (for no reason
| other than being abused by product decisions), but older
| generations grew up with physical media. "I have a piece of
| paper, I have a book, I have a CD-ROM, and those are all
| different kinds of files that can go into different "boxes"
| that are called folders".
|
| Files and folders are very natural. The reason people don't
| know about them is because we hide them and force them to
| pay for literally subpar experience.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > is what product people want to believe
|
| It's quite clear what you never had to explain why 'only
| looking at a pictures/photos on the Internet' wasted the
| mobile traffic.
| palata wrote:
| Were you born with the knowledge that a video takes more
| space than a photo that takes more space than a text?
|
| Or is it rather that you consider yourself one of the few
| people smart enough to memorise it? I find that very
| condescending.
|
| I don't believe that one needs 3 postdocs to understand
| it. In fact, I do happen to have explained it quite a few
| times, and I don't remember anyone not understanding it.
| ddingus wrote:
| Folder / Directory
|
| I most frequently use the latter, directory when I am
| talking files and filesystems.
|
| Most people return that with "folder", and I am sure that
| has to with my learning about these things happening
| where "directory" was the norm.
|
| I have been educating people about files when I bump into
| ones that do not know much. The abuses are real and
| growing. Nice comment.
| rakoo wrote:
| There's no formal standard, but I keep seeing this complaint
| from people who just haven't installed syncthing. At this
| point it's not inexistence but mere ignorance
| dist-epoch wrote:
| It's not only about your personal devices. Sometimes you
| want to exchange files between a friend phone's and your
| computer.
| rakoo wrote:
| Which is also way way easier to do than all the existing
| solutions: create a folder on the computer, add the
| computer to the phone, share the folder with the phone.
| Anything you want to share goes in the folder.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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 that all came from the phone driver. I do
| recall also using the computer in reverse the same way when
| the display was badly damaged. I could make phone calls,
| dialing with the computer and in general use the phone
| taped to the back of my laptop screen.
|
| Today, it is simpler, and far less robust.
| torginus wrote:
| This is an UX problem, not a technical problem. You could
| easily use Wifi to transfer files between devices quite fast,
| there's just no agreed upon open protocol for it. Afaik
| that's how AirDrop works.
| tgv wrote:
| Airdrop works. Ok, it's platform bound, but I'm sure it could
| be ported.
|
| It's not such a big thing, though. I hardly use it, and young
| people don't seem to use it either. The stuff on their phone
| and laptop seem separate worlds, just like mine are. Might be
| because they don't know about it, though.
| palata wrote:
| Because we keep them ignorant. We make sure they depend on
| our apps that they have to pay for. You wouldn't want them
| to know how to download music/movies without going through
| our paid streaming platforms, would you?
| fragmede wrote:
| Hell, copy and paste works between iphone and MacOS if
| you've got the same icloud logged into both. Airplay is too
| cumbersome has been supplanted by long hold -> copy;
| ctrl-v, and the reverse. Works for images as well.
| variaga wrote:
| 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.
| simoncion wrote:
| > 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 you
| were doing demos with, what went wrong between the demo table
| and the finished product?
| variaga wrote:
| 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.)
| thangalin wrote:
| > 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...
| xandrius wrote:
| But today we can have wireless charge too, would that change
| things?
| moritonal wrote:
| USB over QI wireless would be great.
| variaga wrote:
| I think it could. If wireless charging docks has been common
| at the time, the upgrade to "now your wireless charger can do
| data sync too" is a straightforward improvement.
|
| Unfortunately, at the time there was only one phone that had
| wireless charging built in (Palm Pre). I know our sales and
| marketing did try to engage with them on getting wireless usb
| into "the next version" of the Pre, but nothing came of it. I
| don't know the details.
|
| At this point wifi is ubiquitous enough that a new version of
| wireless usb would have a hard time competing with it though.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| In the coming age of AI we can do our own communications
| protocols and leave behind the horrible bt and wifi
| implementations. Right? :D
| londons_explore wrote:
| Imo, at this point nobody should be designing any wireless
| protocol that doesn't support full IP networking.
|
| Sure, your Bluetooth headphones only 1:1 connect to your phone...
| But if they could connect directly to your WiFi router they could
| keep playing music when your phone goes out of range... Or you
| could connect them to two phones... Or you could connect them to
| your TV to get sound from that...
|
| Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but
| also allows far more possibilities.
|
| Same with wireless USB - a wireless USB printer can only print
| from one host - but a wireless IP printer can be on the network
| for all to use.
| explodes wrote:
| I don't want to have to expose any of my devices to the entire
| internet just to use them. Sure one can firewall and block
| things manually, but I would prefer things were secure by
| default.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The _protocol_ should allow it, even if the _implementation_
| perhaps limits users to the local network or some other more
| sensible security policy.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| This directly opposes design principles of secure and
| correct by construction.
|
| If any of my colleagues would make an overly abstracted
| solution for a problem and ship it with a dsl to configure
| it, I would say no, and ask them to solve the problem at
| hand.
| mort96 wrote:
| If the protocol allows it, products using the protocol will
| require it.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| The implementation needs to be controllable and simple
| enough for basic users then. If something is possible,
| companies will abuse it.
| dodslaser wrote:
| Please do not give me more devices that need to connect to my
| WiFi for basic functionality. These devices add congestion,
| attack surface, and give manufacturers access to way more
| information than I am comfortable with. I already have to fight
| my washing machine, stove, refrigerator, etc. on this.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections,
| but also allows far more possibilities.
| immibis wrote:
| And requires more configuration! Sure let me just type a
| netmask into my headphones by tapping the volume buttons.
| freehorse wrote:
| > allows far more possibilities.
|
| >> attack surface, and give manufacturers access to way
| more information than I am comfortable with
|
| When your device is on your WiFi you cannot be completely
| sure what it does (unless you monitor the traffic).
| gbear605 wrote:
| As opposed to a USB device which requires you to install
| an opaque driver, which could also phone home? That's
| hardly a win as far as security goes.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Hey, is your root password still bazz1l?
|
| I've got a cat named Emacs, but he's not allowed to be a
| root password.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You're not going to get low power consumption with IP. That's a
| problem for small battery powered devices.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You will as long as the protocol is designed to be power
| efficient.
|
| I agree though that existing WiFi networks are hard to
| connect to from devices where battery life needs to be
| measured in months.
| fulafel wrote:
| Bluetooth had networking already in the early days (PAN).
| londons_explore wrote:
| Still there on android phones.
|
| It's so terribly slow it's almost unusable, but does seem to
| be substantiality more power efficient than running a WiFi
| hotspot all the time.
| stavros wrote:
| The main reason why I love Zigbee is that it _doesn 't_ support
| full IP networking. It's about broadcasting standard messages
| to all the devices, like a message queue, and that's fantastic
| for the use case.
|
| No firewalls to worry about, no external access, nothing, just
| all my devices automatically communicating with all other
| devices.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I personally don't think this comment would be so outrageously
| wrong. I for one thought about making a Wi-Fi headphone for
| couple times.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| In certain cases, plug-and-play interfaces outperform wireless
| mediums.
| brudgers wrote:
| Maybe the deeper problem with wireless USB was that "Wireless
| USB" is an appealing word salad rather than a solution a
| meaningful problem.
|
| I mean a wireless USB hub would eliminate exactly one cable [1]
| and onboard wireless USB requires the same number of radios as
| WiFi. [2] But "Wireless USB" still sounds a kinda' sexy answer to
| "What are you working on?" [3]
|
| [1] Wirelessly eliminating one USB cable already had its critical
| solution in a mature dongle dependent wireless mouse market.
|
| [2] For example WiFi printers were already a thing and fit into
| the evergreen problem of sharing printers and wireless USB wasn't
| going to improve online experience.
|
| [3] "Wireless USB" is a great sound bite. Short, sounds like the
| future, and people will feel like they know what it means. [4]
|
| [4] The article reminded me that indeed at some point in the last
| five years (or maybe ten, these things run together) I thought
| "wireless USB would do that" and googling "wireless usb" because
| surely it must exist but of course it didn't really and I
| probably bought a long cable off eBay. But I remember coming up
| with the thought and googling.
| michelb wrote:
| Didn't help you had to flip the signal up-down-up to get it
| working.
| jajko wrote:
| That's one thing, but what happened to wireless HDMI? That would
| save a lot of cable pain in literally all households out there
| too.
| izacus wrote:
| It exists if you pay for a pair of dongles and are ok with
| bandwidth compormises.
| usrusr wrote:
| And replace cable pain with ISM congestion pain? Living in a
| somewhat densely populated area I find myself switch off Wi-Fi
| on my smartphone because paid LTE is so much more reliable
| quite often.
| jonesjohnson wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but I'm totally in favor of letting HDMI
| die the slow and agonizing death it's supposed to die.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
| RantyDave wrote:
| Awesome. Now do WiMax.
| ElFitz wrote:
| 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 head tracking.
|
| Turned out, it was a widespread issue with that WUSB chip.
| myself248 wrote:
| Seems like you could spend a smidgen of that battery power on a
| fan, no?
| brudgers wrote:
| [I am not a physicist]
|
| Wouldn't a fan in a backpack just move hot air including the
| heat of its motor?
| owenversteeg wrote:
| 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.
| brudgers wrote:
| 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.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| 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
| chip and increasing the temperature of the air in the
| backpack. It will also increase the rate of heat transfer
| from the backpack air to the backpack, which will
| increase the rate of heat transfer from the backpack to
| the environment.
|
| Notably, the fan would help even if the backpack was a
| magic closed system (which it is not; put a 100W computer
| and a 1kWh battery into it, open ten hours later, and you
| will not have anywhere near 1kWh of heat.) But why would
| it help in a closed system? Because the chip does not
| care about the total energy in the system, the chip cares
| about the peak chip temperature. The chip will always be
| the hottest thing in the backpack, but the delta in
| temperature between the chip and the air can be quite
| large. Indeed, in practice, for "natural convection" (no
| fan), this dT between the chip and the air is
| considerable. When you add a fan ("forced convection")
| you shrink that dT substantially.
| ddingus wrote:
| Thank you. I learned something fundamental from your
| comment that I did not know prior. Well, maybe I did, but
| how I think about it makes it harder to reason about.
|
| Whatever, it is easier to see for me now. Lol
|
| Seeing the benefit of the fan in terms of increased heat
| transfer to everything the air touches is easy. Full
| stop.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| You're very welcome!
|
| Heat is a fascinating thing. I can really recommend
| trying to visualize it and "playing around" with it in
| your daily life to get a stronger intuition for things.
| Pay attention to the thermal conductivity of the things
| around you and how that "feels": aluminum or copper
| extremely high, other metals high, plastics and woods
| low, fabrics and foams very low. Notice how evaporating
| water is very powerful at cooling things down, and how
| condensing water can warm things up. Notice how a small
| hot object cools slowly but a larger one can reject the
| same amount of heat very fast. Inspect the back of your
| fridge, or the inside of an A/C, and understand what's
| going on and where the energy is.
| ddingus wrote:
| Well, your comment is timely. I am part of a project
| about to embark on some highly specialized thermal
| simulation.
|
| I will be doing exactly what you suggested to me here.
| ElFitz wrote:
| We later replaced the backpack with a home-made open mesh
| grid onto which the receiver was strapped.
|
| But that just bought us a bit more run time without actually
| solving anything.
|
| From what I'd gathered at the time, it was a common issue
| with products that relied on that specific chip, and I doubt
| most shared our use case.
| ajross wrote:
| Interestingly one of the competing chipsets for Wireless USB
| lives on today... in the market-leading[1] Spektrum radios for RC
| vehicle control. Their DSMx protocol is based on the Cypress
| Semiconductor products, which are still available in the market
| despite not being recommended for new designs.
|
| [1] But certainly not best. Consensus for "best" goes to the open
| source ExpressLRS work based on the Semtech LoRa products.
| znpy wrote:
| This post has unlocked the memory of seeing some Intel CEO
| demoing wireless power and connectivity for laptops.
|
| Basically you "just" put your laptop on your desk and it
| automatically starts getting power (similar to what phones can do
| nowadays) as well transmit video to a display (on the same desk).
|
| It's sad that went nowhere, it would have been very cool and
| something actually useful.
| palata wrote:
| > it would have been very cool and something actually useful.
|
| Less efficient, just for "cool". I think it's better to stick
| with cables.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Yep!
|
| It would be a marginal. Improvement at a huge increase in
| complexity
|
| Adjacent intention on the same action that leads to a
| connected computer, eg. I put my laptop on my friend table
| for storage, and it connects against my intention.
| palata wrote:
| Totally. Many accessories nowadays require bluetooth/wifi
| where actually they could be connected with a cable: they
| don't move and they need to be charged.
|
| Connecting over a cable is trivial: you detect the
| connection and that's it, and the user physically sees the
| connection between the devices.
|
| Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very
| frustrating when it doesn't work. Pairing is annoying so
| devices try to automatically reconnect, but then if you
| pair with multiple devices, it brings frustration because
| it never automatically connects to what the user wants.
|
| Whenever cables are a possible solution, they are superior.
| znpy wrote:
| > Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very
| frustrating when it doesn't work.
|
| Everything's frustrating when it doesn't work.
|
| > Connecting over radio requires pairing
|
| This is a solved problem, plagued by technology
| fragmentation. You could very well save the necessary
| information for discovery and pairing onto an NFC tag and
| use that to access the network (further authentication
| might happen, if configured).
|
| This is basically never done on WiFi because you cannot
| assume a client host has a NFC reader (let alone proper
| code handling the tag and the information).
|
| But it's done in the world of bluetooth: some big-name
| headsets (Sony IIRC) can do bluetooth connection
| negotiation via NFC. You activate the feature (dedicated
| button), tap your phone and off you go. No pin, no
| pairing annoyances.
| palata wrote:
| > Everything's frustrating when it doesn't work.
|
| My point being that it cannot be frustrating if it
| doesn't exist.
|
| > This is a solved problem
|
| Tell that to my airpods that connect to the wrong device
| (so I need to manually go connect to them most of the
| time) and to my phone that doesn't automatically connect
| to my airpods when it is already connected to my watch.
|
| Granted, I want wireless between my phone, watch and
| headset. But I wouldn't call it a solved problem.
| m000 wrote:
| 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 proliferation which was already dawning
| (e.g. iPAQ handhelds were available at the time [3]).
|
| So, they ended up with most of their envisioned use-cases [4]
| being covered either by SBCs, or by Bluetooth. At least in
| retrospect, standarizing a pure software solution like USB over
| IP, as an added-value proposition for the USB standard, would
| have made more sense.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument#Abraham_...
|
| [2] https://www.usb.org/about
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB#Uses
| Biganon wrote:
| To the aithor : careful, on one picture at least you blacked out
| the human-readable PIN of a device, but forgot to black out the
| corresponding barcode right below
| skinner927 wrote:
| That's the MAC address barcode
| Biganon wrote:
| ...the MAC address barcode was below the MAC address, the PIN
| barcode was below the PIN.
|
| They fixed it now.
| Marsymars wrote:
| 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 360deg
| camera.)
| meanmrmustard92 wrote:
| "depending on executive and blood alcohol level" is such a good
| throwaway joke
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