It might seem strange to people like us, but normal people hate wires. Really hate wires. A lot. So it makes sense that with so many wireless technologies, there should be a way to do USB over wireless. There is, but it really hasn’t caught on outside of a few small pockets. [Cameron Kaiser] wants to share why he thinks the technology never went anywhere.
Wireless USB makes sense. We have high-speed wireless networking. Bluetooth doesn’t handle that kind of speed, but forms a workable wireless network. In the background, of course, would be competing standards.
Texas Instruments and Intel wanted to use multiband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) to carry data using a large number of subcarriers. Motorola (later Freescale), HP, and others were backing the competing direct sequence ultra-wideband or DS-UWB. Attempts to come up with a common system degenerated.
This led to two systems W-USB (later CF-USB) and CW-USB. CF-USB looked just like regular USB to the computer and software. It was essentially a hub that had wireless connections. CW-USB, on the other hand, had cool special features, but required changes at the driver and operating system level.
Check out the post to see a bewildering array of orphaned and incompatible products that just never caught on. As [Cameron] points out, WiFi and Bluetooth have improved to the point that these devices are now largely obsolete.
Of course, you can transport USB over WiFi, and maybe that’s the best answer, today. That is, if you really hate wires.
As a hacker, I love cables for myself, but everyone else in my apartment building should feel free to use the RF spectrum if they want.
As a hacker, I love the RF spectrum, so everyone else should please use cables whenever they can.
No, seriously, RF interference is getting really out of hand. In many crowded locations we have a critical-mass cocktail party effect, where all the devices have maxed out their output power to get over the din, just making worse, and retries and backoffs start making latencies unusable.
Not to mention basically the mess of the whole HF spectrum due to crappy switching power supplies and the devil-spawn Powerline Ethernet.
Hear, hear! Over the past 20 years, my suburban neighbors’ net enthusiasm has significantly degraded my WiFi to the point where I’ve had to snake wired ethernet to anything important. Meanwhile, I’d bet money someone nearby is watching HDTV over WiFi because, well, who can be bothered hassle with CAT-6? Oh shoot, my wife’s “cut cord” TV is doing just that, better fix it!
A few weeks ago my TV service stopped working. My provider forced me to upgrade to WiFi TV with the promise the quality would increase. They lowered the monthly cost for not using the coax anymore. You know, the coax the builder installed when my house was built. Service quality has gone down.
I dream of wires…
I am the final silence.
The last electrician alive.
And they called me ‘The Sparkle’.
I was the best, I worked them all.
I actually was inclined to reply with ‘Here in my wire I feel safest of all, it keeps me stable for days’ but that’s even weirder. And being weirder than Gary Numan is saying something.
It’s the only way to live… in wires!
+1
New ways, new ways…
You still need to run the power wires so I don’t see the point… If only there was a way to phase array signal and enough power to run the target device, this might make sense, but it probably is next to impossible to transmit wireless power over more than few millimeters without wasting most of it.
This is for situations where your device is too far from you client to simply run a cable. You can still provide power to the device.
That said, I’m struggling to identify a device class for which there isn’t already a more targeted remote protocol. Flash drives can be shared with nfs/samba etc. Remote keyboards/mice too far for a cable don’t make sense. Printers can already be shared out of the box.
Test instruments with vendor specific protocols perhaps. Personally, I’d just remote in though.
Still a useful piece of knowledge to keep in mind, should I hit a brick wall in the future.
I’m perennially annoyed at the fact that DIY arcade sticks have no settled “story” for wireless connectivity. Sure, you get the odd builder doing something with ESP32 or whatever. But there’s no wireless option that comes close to the glory of GP2040-CE. I would happily resort to USB-over-BT options if those were readily available (and competitive on latency). I don’t want to drag a 4 meter-long cable from the couch to the TV.
Yeah this was the exact thing I was thinking about when I saw this article, I just wanna use my arcade stick on the TV without running a super long USB-C cable.
I came across a use case the other day (for which I may try to DIY a solution, eventually): I found a mouse with a document scanner in it. It uses SLAM to track itself over the surface and automatically stitch a bunch of photos together into a whole document. It would be much more convenient as a wireless device, since the cable gets in the way of moving it around an open book I’m trying to scan. It’s already fairly large, though, so I’m not sure where the battery will go…
I have done so many 50 Meter power amped runs I’ve lost count.
The gear was usually extron and occasionally Kramer.
So never had a drama.
Sparkey just ran his 3.5 m accessory TPS run to where I needed it and sat down toying with his Stanley pliers all day after he was done.
“You still need to run the power wires so I don’t see the point…”
uh
why?
batteries exist?
It starts out by saying, “normal people hate wires. Really hate wires. A lot.” I hate having to think about the state of charge of batteries, and recharge things regularly. If they’re low-enough powered to be able to use alkaline batteries and leave them for months or even years, without attention, that’s better; otherwise I’d prefer a wall wart with a DC-10 plug. One of the things I hate about USB is that there are 11 kinds of mutually incompatible connectors. So many things recharge by USB; and I have seven kinds of USB cords on my desk, and whichever one I have plugged into the PC’s only spare USB port is always the wrong one for whatever I need next.
There’s also plenty of proof that all this wirelessly communicating stuff is slowly doing a lot of damage to our health. Even when it’s nowhere near strong enough to be ionizing, it does single- and double-strand DNA breaks, promoting cancer and other problems. I can provide plenty of documentation of that.
“There’s also plenty of proof”
Dude, the reason why there’s plenty of proof is because there’s literally not enough time to disprove every wackball idea out there. When you test for 1000 crazy things, you’ll get multiple 3-sigma results. That’s the way math works.
“it does single- and double-strand DNA breaks, promoting cancer and other problems”
Life causes single and double-stranded DNA breaks. That’s the way it works. There’s this big giant fusion generator bathing our planet in damaging radiation. There’s radioactive material seeping from the ground constantly.
It’s actually hard to find things that don’t cause cancer, because cancer’s a side effect of being alive.
You apparently don’t want to believe. It prompts me to round up my sources from scientists, studies, and lab tests, and make a web page linking them and giving a short description of each. I can’t take time to do it right now though. There’s too much. It’ll take you many hours to get through it all.
How about repurposing USB dongles from the wireless keyboards?
Full USB over TCP/IP over WiFi should be possible with 2 STM32 and 2 ESP32 modules to form both ends of the link.
Why not QAM? It’s native to RF and scalable for bandwidth. Everyone with broadband cable modems uses it.
Powered HDMI #😀