HID Relay Project

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RedlegIO
 
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HID Relay Project

Post by RedlegIO »

Disclaimer: I have zero microcontroller (all flavors) experience, please bear with me.

I recently had an idea to make a 2-port USB hub that would allow me to free up the 2 USB-A ports on my work laptop since they're occupied by a dongle and a security key that I always need. A USB hub won't fit my needs since I work in a fulfillment center and am away from my desk most of the time. The arduino project in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7lEDS6xj5w from a few years ago meets my minimum needs, but on to my question:

Would one of the BLE-enabled feather boards allow me to do the same thing in a smaller form factor? Also, are they compatible with a USB board similar to what was used in the video? I haven't been able to find any female USB-A Port FeatherWings.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: HID Relay Project

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

BLE is a few orders of magnitude slower than USB.

Even low-speed USB runs at 1Mbps. Full-speed is 12Mbps, and high-speed is 480Mbps.

BLE can do a few kilobits per second on a good day.. each packet carries 20 bytes of user data, the protocol allows up to 6 packets per ’connection interval’, and there’s a minumum 7.5ms gap between intervals. The theoretical limit is around 128kbps or about 15kBps.

In practice, most devices only handle two or three packets per interval, or have a longer delay between intervals:

https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing- ... aq-2346712

‘Bluetooth’ is a collective name for a group of mostly-incompatible wireless protocols managed by the same industry working group with a penchant for confusingly similar names. The device in the video you linked uses what’s now known as Bluetooth Classic, which has a bitrate of 1Mbps. There’s also ‘high speed Bluetooth’, which is really a Wifi connection whose authentication is done over BT-C.

For what you want to do, you’ll need the same kind of hacked HC-05 module shown in the video.

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