10 ms·

I'm surprised this isn't discussed more widely (though even vendors know about this [0]). My wireless Logitech mouse didn't work properly when I had a hub conne

by harha 6y ago

I'm surprised this isn't discussed more widely (though even vendors know about this [0]). My wireless Logitech mouse didn't work properly when I had a hub connected to bring some connections to the front of my iMac (both with Bluetooth and the dongle the mouse had a significant lag). It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment. [0]: https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023414273-Wireless-product-not-working-properly-when-also-using-a-USB-3-0-device https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360023414273-Wire...

rootusrootus 6y ago
Yeah I thought it was relatively well known. I have my Logitech wireless dongle on a USB extension cable just to get it away from the hub.
- darkteflon 6y ago
  Would be nice if Logitech made this information available on their support website.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Right? I have a set of 4 F710s game controllers hooked to a pi 4 emulation box and I'd been looking everywhere for info on what to do about their flaky connection.
TacoToni 6y ago
Wow, is this why i have lag on my MX Master mouse connected to thunderbolt dock whether im on my mac or work PC? It is frustratingly laggy at times.
- burke 6y ago
  Yeah, if you get a little USB extension cable or one of the Apple USB breakout dongles and plug that into the thunderbolt dock/hub, and plug the RF dongle into that, the problem goes away.
  - TacoToni 6y ago
    Thank you so much! Trying this now.
- ballenf 6y ago
  I miss that wired Apple keyboard with the the two USB sockets on the sides. Still have one but don't use it since it's USB-A and would need dongle plus extra cable.
  - harha 6y ago
    Careful that one has a bad design too: without an extension cable it often doesn’t work. I’ve read it might be because it’s not drawing enough power to switch on. Apart from that it’s just amazing, better (not as flat) keys than the magic make it perfect to type on, the usb on the side makes adding a wired mouse easy (and keeps the dongle close for wireless). I ordered several when I heard they were discontinued but still in stock at my old company just in case.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  Some friends seem to think I'm a luddite when I say this, but this is one reason why I have no wireless mice, keyboard or headphones. Why introduce batteries that can lose charge and potentially unreliable wireless connections when you can have a cheaper, more reliable device with a plain old USB cable? The same goes for wifi. I make sure my work computer is wired through ethernet. Why would I want to risk downtime or random disconnections during meetings?
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    > Why introduce batteries that can lose charge and potentially unreliable wireless connections when you can have a cheaper, more reliable device with a plain old USB cable? The answer, of course, is that you no longer have as many wires on your desk and in your bag. If you need very high reliability and fidelity, like if you’re a professional gamer or something, or you know you’re in noisy or otherwise troublesome environments, by all means use wired peripherals. I also use a wired keyboard and mouse, but it’s only because my favorite keyboard and mouse aren’t wireless and I haven’t found great wireless alternatives.
  - TacoToni 6y ago
    Honestly, I've debated going back to wired. I never move my keyboard or mouse from my desk, so I might as well bring back wired peripherals.
    - Pxtl 6y ago
      Keyboard has zero value in being wireless. Mouse... that's the tough call because the cable is annoying on a mouse.
      - epse 6y ago
        There is some little value if you're short on USB ports and both mouse and keyboard use Logitech unifying... But it's a small advantage
      - minusf 6y ago
        one man's useless is another man's gold. i love my bt keyboard and the freedom it gives me in the flat.
function_seven 6y ago
Ran into an issue with my Home Assistant setup, using a USB dongle to create a Zigbee network. Had to use a USB extension cable to move the dongle a few feet away from the Intel NUC that it was connected to. When I was searching for solutions to my intermittent problems, I didn't believe that an extension would solve it. It just felt like "blowing into the NES cartridge" to me. But I kept seeing the same advice, so I gave it a shot and whaddyaknow? Zero issues afterward.
- atomicfiredoll 6y ago
  My Conbee II is struggling with constant disconnecting--to the point that I've had to put my Home Assistant project aside until I can find more time. I've tried putting it on an extension cable after finding a stray GitHub issue advising so, but it was no use. I'm certainly going to be looking at the problem through a new lens now that I'm aware of these wider issues.
  - ornornor 6y ago
    FWIW, the conbee II is... not a great device. It has what seems to be a fundamental flaw with its USB firmware which makes the device reset itself at regular intervals. The result is that it disconnects from the host and reconnects (as if you pulled the actual device out of the plug) I used to run HA in a VM via qemu/libvirt and it would always fail because when the device reconnects its on a different port and the USB pass through doesn’t work anymore. Now I’m running the HA VM on proxmox which deals with disconnects reconnects better for pass through devices: it’s able to reconnect it to the vm without my intervention. Looking at the logs, this happens between a couple times a week to 10+ times a week. I tried an extension lead (which had no impact, I think this solves zigbee radio issues but not USB issues), using a powered USB hub, using a USB 2 port, a USB 3 port, three different machines... no dice. It really is a bug in the device itself. And Dresden electronics has piss poor support (still waiting for any answer from their email support six months later). The only avenue for “support” is via GitHub issues where other users answer but not actual Dresden electronics employees.
    - 6y ago
reader_mode 6y ago
So is this why my MX keys and mouse drop BT randomly on my MBP ? I noticed it was more likely when I plug in stuff like android phone for debugging but I thought it was a coincidence... so are there ways to fix this ? shielded cables and hubs ?
- daishi424 6y ago
  Are you using Type-C to Type-C cable with an Android phone? Yeah well, finding a USB2.0 cable with both Type-C ports might present a challenge.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    They're easy to find. Anker, amazon basics, monoprice all have them.
ohazi 6y ago
> It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment. This is entirely a problem of our own making. We give cellular providers hundreds of MHz of exclusive spectrum access, and then deprecate and auction off the old analog TV channels to give them hundreds more, but we expect everybody else to shove all of their traffic into a 100 MHz block at 2.4 GHz. It's not that this standard is doing anything particularly nasty to the environment, it's just that it happens to be messing with the one tiny head-of-a-pin that we've decided everything needs to live on. It's a computer controlled radio for crying out loud, give us 400 MHz and let the computer figure out how to hop around.
- hctaw 6y ago
  The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile. 2.4GHz may be crowded, but it's nowhere near as bad as mobile where the demand for bandwidth has been doubling yearly for two decades.
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    This is a part of the mobile market. They're the same market. 5G providers have frequencies that can't travel through walls and don't even make sense for a long-distance network. Those frequencies should just be part of the Wifi standard.
  - ohazi 6y ago
    The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons. There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office. We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd. On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation. Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum. A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis. Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.
minimaxir 6y ago
I use 3 Logitech USB wireless devices (mouse, keyboard, headset) for my iMac and have had zero wireless issues. It's weird.
- harha 6y ago
  You might not have a hub. I’ve added one because the back usb and card reader were hard to reach, that is when the problems started. It might be the dock but I’ve had issues with others too and I don’t want to order any dock I can find and test which ones don’t interfere, especially after I did some research and found out it may be linked to USB 3.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    I have a hub with no issues Seeing as there is a wide range of quality for USB hubs, part of me wonders if this is just poorly designed ones worsening potential issues
    - harha 6y ago
      Possibly, but given that even Intel and Logitech comment on this issue I won't take the cost and effort of testing them all and reviews are often also pretty worthless.
dheera 6y ago
Nothing Logitech has worked for me in USB 3.0 for half a decade now and I can't believe they don't yet admit to it on their front page in big letters and make 2.5 or 2.6 GHz or whatever adjustments are necessary to avoid interference. The only thing that has worked for me is to plug the Logitech receivers into a USB 2.0 only hub.

by harha 6y ago

rootusrootus 6y ago

Yeah I thought it was relatively well known. I have my Logitech wireless dongle on a USB extension cable just to get it away from the hub.

darkteflon 6y ago
Would be nice if Logitech made this information available on their support website.
- Pxtl 6y ago
  Right? I have a set of 4 F710s game controllers hooked to a pi 4 emulation box and I'd been looking everywhere for info on what to do about their flaky connection.

TacoToni 6y ago

Wow, is this why i have lag on my MX Master mouse connected to thunderbolt dock whether im on my mac or work PC? It is frustratingly laggy at times.

burke 6y ago
Yeah, if you get a little USB extension cable or one of the Apple USB breakout dongles and plug that into the thunderbolt dock/hub, and plug the RF dongle into that, the problem goes away.
- TacoToni 6y ago
  Thank you so much! Trying this now.
ballenf 6y ago
I miss that wired Apple keyboard with the the two USB sockets on the sides. Still have one but don't use it since it's USB-A and would need dongle plus extra cable.
- harha 6y ago
  Careful that one has a bad design too: without an extension cable it often doesn’t work. I’ve read it might be because it’s not drawing enough power to switch on. Apart from that it’s just amazing, better (not as flat) keys than the magic make it perfect to type on, the usb on the side makes adding a wired mouse easy (and keeps the dongle close for wireless). I ordered several when I heard they were discontinued but still in stock at my old company just in case.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
Some friends seem to think I'm a luddite when I say this, but this is one reason why I have no wireless mice, keyboard or headphones. Why introduce batteries that can lose charge and potentially unreliable wireless connections when you can have a cheaper, more reliable device with a plain old USB cable? The same goes for wifi. I make sure my work computer is wired through ethernet. Why would I want to risk downtime or random disconnections during meetings?
- tshaddox 6y ago
  > Why introduce batteries that can lose charge and potentially unreliable wireless connections when you can have a cheaper, more reliable device with a plain old USB cable? The answer, of course, is that you no longer have as many wires on your desk and in your bag. If you need very high reliability and fidelity, like if you’re a professional gamer or something, or you know you’re in noisy or otherwise troublesome environments, by all means use wired peripherals. I also use a wired keyboard and mouse, but it’s only because my favorite keyboard and mouse aren’t wireless and I haven’t found great wireless alternatives.
- TacoToni 6y ago
  Honestly, I've debated going back to wired. I never move my keyboard or mouse from my desk, so I might as well bring back wired peripherals.
  - Pxtl 6y ago
    Keyboard has zero value in being wireless. Mouse... that's the tough call because the cable is annoying on a mouse.
    - epse 6y ago
      There is some little value if you're short on USB ports and both mouse and keyboard use Logitech unifying... But it's a small advantage
    - minusf 6y ago
      one man's useless is another man's gold. i love my bt keyboard and the freedom it gives me in the flat.

function_seven 6y ago

Ran into an issue with my Home Assistant setup, using a USB dongle to create a Zigbee network. Had to use a USB extension cable to move the dongle a few feet away from the Intel NUC that it was connected to. When I was searching for solutions to my intermittent problems, I didn't believe that an extension would solve it. It just felt like "blowing into the NES cartridge" to me. But I kept seeing the same advice, so I gave it a shot and whaddyaknow? Zero issues afterward.

atomicfiredoll 6y ago
My Conbee II is struggling with constant disconnecting--to the point that I've had to put my Home Assistant project aside until I can find more time. I've tried putting it on an extension cable after finding a stray GitHub issue advising so, but it was no use. I'm certainly going to be looking at the problem through a new lens now that I'm aware of these wider issues.
- ornornor 6y ago
  FWIW, the conbee II is... not a great device. It has what seems to be a fundamental flaw with its USB firmware which makes the device reset itself at regular intervals. The result is that it disconnects from the host and reconnects (as if you pulled the actual device out of the plug) I used to run HA in a VM via qemu/libvirt and it would always fail because when the device reconnects its on a different port and the USB pass through doesn’t work anymore. Now I’m running the HA VM on proxmox which deals with disconnects reconnects better for pass through devices: it’s able to reconnect it to the vm without my intervention. Looking at the logs, this happens between a couple times a week to 10+ times a week. I tried an extension lead (which had no impact, I think this solves zigbee radio issues but not USB issues), using a powered USB hub, using a USB 2 port, a USB 3 port, three different machines... no dice. It really is a bug in the device itself. And Dresden electronics has piss poor support (still waiting for any answer from their email support six months later). The only avenue for “support” is via GitHub issues where other users answer but not actual Dresden electronics employees.
  - 6y ago

reader_mode 6y ago

So is this why my MX keys and mouse drop BT randomly on my MBP ? I noticed it was more likely when I plug in stuff like android phone for debugging but I thought it was a coincidence... so are there ways to fix this ? shielded cables and hubs ?

daishi424 6y ago
Are you using Type-C to Type-C cable with an Android phone? Yeah well, finding a USB2.0 cable with both Type-C ports might present a challenge.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  They're easy to find. Anker, amazon basics, monoprice all have them.

ohazi 6y ago

> It's hard to believe that there is a standard and devices are widely deployed that mess so so much with their environment. This is entirely a problem of our own making. We give cellular providers hundreds of MHz of exclusive spectrum access, and then deprecate and auction off the old analog TV channels to give them hundreds more, but we expect everybody else to shove all of their traffic into a 100 MHz block at 2.4 GHz. It's not that this standard is doing anything particularly nasty to the environment, it's just that it happens to be messing with the one tiny head-of-a-pin that we've decided everything needs to live on. It's a computer controlled radio for crying out loud, give us 400 MHz and let the computer figure out how to hop around.

hctaw 6y ago
The market rate for 400 MHz is $80 billion. There's only one industry with enough demand and revenue to justify that purchase price, which is mobile. 2.4GHz may be crowded, but it's nowhere near as bad as mobile where the demand for bandwidth has been doubling yearly for two decades.
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  This is a part of the mobile market. They're the same market. 5G providers have frequencies that can't travel through walls and don't even make sense for a long-distance network. Those frequencies should just be part of the Wifi standard.
- ohazi 6y ago
  The FCC's job is not to get every last penny for every last Hz, it's to be a good steward of the commons. There is utility in the general public being able to use more unlicensed spectrum at home and in the office. We can argue about what the right breakdown might be, but I'll start by asserting that ~3 GHz in total between Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, vs. only 250 MHz in total for the entirety of local, short-range wireless communication is absurd. On Wi-Fi, everybody just shouts at each other. On mobile, providers buy huge swaths of spectrum, partially as a monopolistic strategy to make life harder for competitors, and partially because they're still using cell allocation strategies from the '80s. They maintain exclusive rights to blocks that they are not using in a region, because the towers two cells away are using them, and it's just easier to use a fixed checkerboard allocation. Both Wi-Fi and 3GPP standards can and should be improved to make better use of temporarily unused spectrum. A good start might be to prevent carriers from having exclusive rights to any spectrum. At least one layer of the cellular protocols should be standardized across carriers allowing towers and phones to dynamically request and then relinquish spectrum on an as-needed basis. Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa.

minimaxir 6y ago

I use 3 Logitech USB wireless devices (mouse, keyboard, headset) for my iMac and have had zero wireless issues. It's weird.

harha 6y ago
You might not have a hub. I’ve added one because the back usb and card reader were hard to reach, that is when the problems started. It might be the dock but I’ve had issues with others too and I don’t want to order any dock I can find and test which ones don’t interfere, especially after I did some research and found out it may be linked to USB 3.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  I have a hub with no issues Seeing as there is a wide range of quality for USB hubs, part of me wonders if this is just poorly designed ones worsening potential issues
  - harha 6y ago
    Possibly, but given that even Intel and Logitech comment on this issue I won't take the cost and effort of testing them all and reviews are often also pretty worthless.

dheera 6y ago

Nothing Logitech has worked for me in USB 3.0 for half a decade now and I can't believe they don't yet admit to it on their front page in big letters and make 2.5 or 2.6 GHz or whatever adjustments are necessary to avoid interference. The only thing that has worked for me is to plug the Logitech receivers into a USB 2.0 only hub.