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> I would expect any computer with USB to act as a USB host. Do you expect your Keyboard to act as a USB Host? If your Keyboard were USB OTG, then it would be
by dragontamer 3y ago
> I would expect any computer with USB to act as a USB host.
Do you expect your Keyboard to act as a USB Host?
If your Keyboard were USB OTG, then it would be a keyboard when plugged into a computer, but a mouse could plug into the keyboard and then the keyboard would be the USB Host. This bi-directional feature would be useful for maybe a modern Commodore 64 like device or something (I dunno, just making stuff up).
Traditionally, USB OTG was for phones. They want to be a device when plugged into a computer, but the phones also want to accept a mouse/keyboard/USB Mass Storage.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThat question is nonsensical. A keyboard is not a computer; it's CONNECTED to a computer. This device IS a computer, and you would typically connect a keyboard to IT. "OTG" is inherently meaningless. Kind of like a "red flag warning" (for any CA readers).
- stonogo 3y ago"Inherently meaningless" is fine for a name. Anyway this one has an externally-applied meaning in the form of an actual specification, which defines OTG explicitly: On-The-Go: An OTG product is a portable device that uses a single Micro-AB receptacle (and no other USB receptacles) to operate at times as a USB Targeted Host and at times as a USB peripheral. OTG devices shall always operate as a standard peripheral when connected to a standard USB host. You can get the rest of the details from the specification itself: https://www.usb.org/document-library/go-and-embedded-host-supplement-usb-revision-30-specification-revision-11 https://www.usb.org/document-library/go-and-embedded-host-su...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThanks for the reference. As to "meaningless is fine..." no. And doubly no to the abbreviation of a meaningless name. "Dual-mode" or "dual-role" USB would make at least some sense and convey some information.
- IshKebab 3y agoNope! a) A keyboard has a little computer in it too. Fundamentally they're both computers. It's not the "computerness" that matters, it's "is this normally a peripheral?" b) This is normally a peripheral - you connect it to a host computer to program it.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoNope! We all know what the implication of the original statement was.
- dragontamer 3y ago> A keyboard is not a computer You underestimate the complexity of modern protocols and the amount of computational power in everyday devices. All USB devices have more compute power than the entirety of the Apollo Moon Lander program. And we use that compute power to format USB checksums, USB packets, and other such protocol details. In practice, a keyboard today has the compute potential exceeding that of supercomputers of decades past. We just don't think about it very much. --------- A modern mouse is more obvious, in that it uses convolution kernels over the scanned 2d infrared picture to figure out if the image moved right, left, up or down about 100x per second and reports the results to the host. That's how optical mouse works. Lots and lots of matrix multiplications and 2d digital signal processing...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoAaand this is the pedantry I expected. Didn't even bother trying to head it off. Why deny this stack of commenters their jollies?
- johnwalkr 3y agoThis device can also act as a device when you connect it to another computer. Maybe "OTG" is not the best name, but rightly or wrongly, that is the accepted name for this feature.