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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   2849 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 27, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's wrong with Bluetooth?

A lot of things. There are more exhaustive breakdowns of the problems with bluetooth. This thread on HN is pretty good, if technical breakdown. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028440 To summarize, its a very low power signal that uses a very congested range. Additionally manufacturers often go as cheaply as possible on the hardware and software controllers as possible. This is BTs main appeal too: its dirt cheap compared to the alternatives. Its extremely susceptible to interference from other devices electronic devices and also from the human body itself. There are some robust software controller options for abating some of these problems but they add to manufacturing costs. For non critical applications like listening to music for leisure its fine. PC peripherals are another issue though. The PC itself creates a good amount of interference, multiple BT devices will interfere with each other, and WIFI also is fighting with BT for the same bandwidth. Tiny hiccups that would be unnoticeable in streaming music, which can buffer audio, when using a BT mouse or keyboard can mean 1-2 second intervals where commands from the mouse/kb either aren't received at all by the PC, or are processed a few seconds late. This might be fine for many applications but if the user is concerned with response times when entering commands while gaming, BT is an exercise in frustration. A good option here is what Logitech uses, which they call Lightspeed, which is radio waves over a dedicated dongle that is permanently paired to its device. https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html

For peripherals, bluetooth only goes up to 125 hz if I remember correctly. You want 1000 hz for your mouse. Very diminishing returns beyond that.

it operates on a pretty crowded/noisy band of the wireless spectrum. For example, if you're using a bluetooth mouse on a modern desktop computer, it's very likely that your USB3 ports are interfering with the bluetooth signal whenever they're active https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf

Not to mention microwave ovens.

Somebody really needs to write a history about how a small chunk of unregulated spectrum set aside for microwaves ended up containing all the stuff we actually use.

Is the entire rest of the spectrum just camped? I think we're missing big chunks of 5ghz wifi spectrum because it was licensed to some satphone operator who never even used it(?)

Yeah, it’s pretty congested. There’s a ton of stuff we want to broadcast.

I was going to say that going higher in frequency is more expensive due to requiring faster sampling, but then I realized I don’t know the receiver architecture. Do they just down convert everything to baseband?

Either way, there’s definitely historical reasons to want those tasty lower frequencies.

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