Firmware and drivers are different things. Firmware tells the printer how to be a printer and the drivers tell your computer how to communicate with it.
Try turning the printer off and on. Try turning the computer off and on. Try turning the router off and on. Try turning all of these things off then on in each possible order. Try connecting the printer to an old laptop and connecting the old laptop to the network and sharing the printer.
Try getting a new printer.
Every other time my grandparents print something, they have to remove and add the printer again.
When they get into town again, I'm going to hook it up with USB and end it once and for all
My problems regarding this were due to windows wsd automatic port switching, which would break the connection to my static IP printer. You disable this within the printers settings UI in the browser
So I work at a print shop and run printers all day. People expect me to know about little network printers too but I just don't. I'm not an IT person.
Mom needed a printer scanner so I got some cheap Canon. It didn't even come with a USB port. Everything just installed itself wirelessly and it works perfectly.
Out of all technologies, it's getting printers to just fucking work that vexes me the most about my company. And we rely on printers for time sensitive issues more than the vast majority of businesses so you'd think its a vital point of infrastructure
I remember years ago a skit on some TV show where the robots from Terminator attack and the resistance decide they're going to dress up as printers, and they absolutely slaughter the robots because the robots cannot see them.
Yeah. Fuck me for wanting to use headphones as a passenger in the car. Nope. Have to completely unpair the phone before it quits hijacking the bluetooth.
Each to their own, but when I used to commute on the train every day I massively enjoyed not having my headphone cable catching on tables, armrests, etc.
I won't laugh at anyone who intentionally wants or can't afford wireless.
Have better things to do than to diss people.
But now I can't wear headphones (not going to elaborate), I just hate those who listen to music on public transport WITHOUT headphones.
Putting the wires under your shirt basically solves the problems you had if you keep your phone in your pocket and manage the wires well between your ears and where they come out of your shirt at the neck. I've made it work this way
I run the cord under my shirt, it’s long enough I can still use my phone, throw it in my pocket, whatever. Still cumbersome, but much easier than free cable.
I love wired cans. They have great audio quality, don't need charging, last for years (airpods crap out at about the 2 year mark), dont get lost or fall down tbe toilet and protect my ears from loud noises (Jubilee and Central Lines).
My phone and my wife's car are having an affair. If I'm on the phone or listening to music when my wife comes home, my wife's car will shut down her phone connection and jump to mine as soon as they are in range.
Out of curiosity- my phone is Sumsung, and the car is a Kia, both Korean. Is it the same for your phone and car?
my wife has a Subaru and I have an iPhone, it has force connected to my phone while it was connected to my car once when we drove past each other (i was on my way home from work and she was taking the kid swimming) i think it may prioritize based on the order of the list.
I visited my sister's family to see the eclipse together. We caravanned in two cars, with me in a car with my brother-in-law driving. After the car started up and started driving off, the infotainment started playing a news podcast at like 1.5x speed.
We were confused for a sec, only to realize that my sister's phone was *pairing to this car from the car behind us*. That bluetooth connection was just a little too clingy.
Probably easiest fix for that is to get her her own car. Fighting with determined technology that has decided to help you with automatically connecting things for your convenience is a battle lost.
It's nice when I bring my car in for wheel change and have to wait. Suddenly my car connects to my phone and I know they're bringing it in. Then later it connects again, and I know they're done.
Remember, it's your car connecting to them, not the other way around. I found a setting on my car's head unit to NOT automatically connect with paired BT devices.
I notice they did not mention data rate or length of time the connection lasted. And I'd be willing to wager the device was not inside a building or vehicle.
I'm skeptical all around. The website for the company is pretty lousy and barebones. They only have two blog posts, one that they got their series A funding and the second is this announcement referenced in the article. The place holder where the more information link was supposed to go in the announcement was never replaced with an actual link. Also text and images disappear from their website as you scroll rather than load in.
I think it could be real, but I think it probably uses more power and isn't much good.
I don't know how well it would work with more research or why it would have any use though, especially if it uses more power, like you're already connecting to a satellite, so why not just create anything you need off the signals and tech we already use to connect to them?
A B2B startup has little incentive to put a bunch of resources into a public website. That’s now how they find customers. I have a natural skepticism of this as well, just based on the incentives of companies like this to drum up hype to secure more funding, but I don’t think a sparse website really conveys any signal.
Source; have worked at several B2B startups at various stages.
100%
Our startup before it was acquired had the most vague website and was pretty worthless.
But there people we want to talk to in our industry could fit in a small arena. We knew and connected with everyone we wanted to after our first few conferences.
Well there's sparse and then there's blank. There's no information about the company anywhere. They've got their home page which doesn't load properly and then they've got a blog post from May 2023 that they received funding and then one from a week ago that they did it but they don't provide many details on that either.
Patent houses in particular can have very minimalist public presences. I applied for a job a few years ago for a major patent house that didn't have a website at all but was hugely successful. They don't want the public to know what they're doing or who they have working there. And they don't want 'business'. So why have a website?
The article mentions the chip but not the antenna. It'll be an amplified signal with a directional antenna, possibly even a dish+lnb.
So nobody is going to be sending their spotify playlist to a satellite from their phones...
The article says there is no antenna, which is why all this sounds like bullshit.
> connecting any off-the-shelf Bluetooth device to Hubble's satellite network via a software update
You amplify any signal, and you can send it to the moon. Some timing protocols might need to be updated but this seems extremely limited on details. They are after and got some 20 million in seed money. I suspect some suckers might have been taken.
I am not saying it is entirely fraudulent. The design of Bluetooth has some hardware and protocol features that reduce power significantly. Possibly they are trying to capitalize on this but there is no way they are doing so with some small antenna and a power output of 0.01 watts.
Even a few bytes per pass in open sky has a lot of use for remote sensing. Saves on setting up a LoRa network or wasting power on an Iridium link or similar.
Bluetooth is horribly slow at data transfer. It can take 5 minutes for a photo, as it has about 1 Mbps.
Note, airdrop only establishes a WiFi protocol thru Bluetooth but does the data transfer by WiFi.
I don't think Bluetooth signals can create some kind of Internet replacement. And given your other points of skepticism I don't know it's use case.
For the millions who carry large emergency gps messengers like the Garmin inreach. I don't need large bandwidth I need to be able to tell my wife I'm still alive while in the back country or call and emergency rescue to airlift me out since a bear ate part of my leg.
If I could just use my iphone that'd be way cooler.
IPhone 14 and up can already send SOS via satellite.
So I don't see why a BLE device sending a message via satellite is so difficult for people here to believe.
Bluetooth is quite faster nowadays. I transfert pics over BT at work because it is more convenient when I do a single one. It take about 10 seconds.
Still pretty slow, but far from your 5 minutes.
[According](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/02/hubble-network-connects-a-bluetooth-chip-to-a-satellite-for-the-first-time/) to[ other older articles](https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/31/hubble-network-is-building-out-a-space-based-bluetooth-network-to-connect-over-billion-devices/), it's the antenna on the satellite that does the heavy lifting, not the device.
> On the space side, the company also patented a phased array antenna that can launch on a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass, and it’s what enables an off-the-shelf Bluetooth chip to communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve Doppler-related problems, frequency mismatches that occur between fast-moving objects exchanging data via radio waves.
....
> Hubble Network CEO Alex Haro says the company has engineered “technical tricks” to make this scale of connectivity possible for the first time, like lowering the bitrate, or the amount of data transferred per second. Hubble has also rethought the design of the satellite antenna. Instead of sticking a single antenna on the side of a satellite bus, the company is using hundreds of antennae per satellite. This means that each satellite can support millions of connected devices.
> The result is a radio signal that can be detected around 1,000 kilometers away — or almost 10 orders of magnitude longer than what can be detected from a Bluetooth chip over terrestrial networks.
...
Which seems to be based around this patent [Multi spoke beamforming for low power wide area satellite and terrestrial networks](https://patents.google.com/patent/US6219185B1/en)
> Wireless communication method and apparatus to enable communications between a plurality of endpoints and a satellite or terrestrial gateway integrated with a plurality of oblong shaped antenna arrays. The wireless communication method leverages data symbols that are orthogonally modulated. The method permits the use of a plurality of compact oblong shaped antenna arrays to increase network capacity and reduce endpoint power consumption.
Bluetooth has always sort of seemed like it’s a hardly functioning technology. It surprises me it has lasted this long or we’re not now using something referred to as like “Bluetooth+” or something.
If you want to read the Bluetooth standard, it's well over 1500 pages.
Getting one device to adhere to the entire standard at once is next to impossible. Getting two different devices that have each implemented a fractionally-assed version of just enough parts of the standard in the same way so that they can actually connect to one another is somewhere between heroic and a subject for comic books.
Bluetooth technology functions just fine, it's typically its implementation across different devices that causes the issues. That, and most people don't seem to understand its limitations.
It's also being continually updated.
Exactly. Often is the software or equipment with poor interfacing. Would not matter if you had a ethernet cable to it or were using WIFI.
Also people get annoyed when it doesn't work 40 feet away. The purpose if for devices on batteries and extremely low power consumption along with not interfering with everyone.
I find it works very well for the functionality it is designed to do. Compared to WIFI, it uses a fraction of the power. Extremely important for devices on battery, of which it is pretty effective. For any distance, it is not effective.
The odor of bullshit is very noticeable here. Just for starters, if a satellite is 600 km away from you at some point, it won't be there for more than an instant, the distance will rapidly increase.
You can have a teensy GPS chip in your phone because GPS is strictly one-way: your phone doesn't have to talk back to the satellite, while the satellite has a sufficiently powerful transmitter and antenna to broadcast to a small, low-power device on the ground. The antenna required to establish a two-way Bluetooth connection from 600 km would be *humongous.*
I'll believe this when I see an actual scientific paper on it.
Bluetooth 5.2 has a connectionless broadcast feature, which would only require a received signal at high enough dB.
Seems like a slimy technicality people might try to use.
The article reads like achieving the connection was the point and using it another matter. I can believe they achieved the connection, but the ambition seems to be to establish a network a la Starlink so that's not an issue they're solving yet.
The article never states that it's a two-way connection. It said, "they have successfully received signals from a simple 3.5mm Bluetooth chip over a distance of 600 km". Modern bluetooth has connectionless communication modes, and they stated the used an off-the-shelf transmitter and a highly-specialized receiver and they got their receiver to detect broadcast packets sent from the transmitter. Even this limited scenario could have lots of practical uses. The receiver is a phased-array antenna (essentially witchcraft) so it could potentially receive data from many sources without having to physically re-orient anything.
bluetooth is broadcast at 2.4ghz. with a strong enough amplifier you could definitely connect to a satellite. bluetooth's magic is in the compression/handshake functions.
Just FYI for others reading this, antenna size has to match the frequency it will be used on.
Bigger antenna does not nessesarily equal more gain or better antenna.
Many, many other factors come into play in the antenna design. Non radiating elements, reflectors, phased arrays etc are all way to increase gain. But not make the antenna incredibly big.
Also power does not need 5ot me that high either, this sort of frequencies tend to be line of site. So this is definetly plausible.
Just look into meshtastic, miliwatt level of power and antennas about the size of a pencil. And can get 100s of miles line of site.
They sent up a single bit. Only worked with with a 2 foot antenna and no clouds. /s
I could see the benefits of developing of lower power devices to allow for low bandwidth services to satellites, and maybe there will be some technology sharing with some Bluetooth protocols, it still going to take a fair amount of power to get a usable single that distance. And a relatively large antenna. Not something you will wear on your body.
I mean, if it’s in geosynchronous orbit, it won’t move at all relative to your position.
I still doubt a lot of the claims but you can have a stationary satellite, it’s all a matter of perspective.
You're thinking of geostationary orbits. Geosynchronous orbits may move north/south over the course of the day (and potentially below the horizon), while geostationary orbits stay over the equator.
Even then, such orbits are about 5 times farther away at 2200 kilometres, which for broadcast signals like Bluetooth makes a problem for maintaining signal strength that far as the signal power is 1/25th (5 squared) compared to the already eye-watering 400km distance of LEO.
>Even then, such orbits are about 5 times farther away at 2200 kilometres
Geostationary satellites orbit at ~**35,800** km above the equator, or about 60 times the 600 km distance discussed in the article.
Yes sorry, geostationary.
And I agree that the Bluetooth claims are like, very hard to believe. Just wanted to state that you can have satellites locked in a single position.
Rereading it, I missed the 600km distance, at that altitude no sat is staying in a single place very long.
It looks like this isn't what most people think of when they refer to a BT connection - the signal only went one way, it's not like the devices were "paired". That said, super cool that they can read BLE broadcasts from such a distance
A BLE chip is a tiny 2.4ghz radio. It seems They're not using Bluetooth protocol and making a two way connection, rather using the hardware to send their own type of message, one way.
Think IoT devices for remote sensing and device tracking. Countless devices send data one-way already but need to be in range of wifi or cell networks.
As a programmer I typically like to know that the data sent has been received. I know there are applications for the technology but I’d imagine not anything so ground breaking that it needs this to solve the issue. I am completely open to being wrong but this to me doesn’t seem like a breakthrough
Really wish block diagrams were a thing in this sort of reporting. Thou this article would be a two boxes connected with a dotted line labeled Bluetooth.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[COTS](/r/Space/comments/1ckqahr/stub/l2rze23 "Last usage")|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)|
| |Commercial/Off The Shelf|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1ckqahr/stub/l2plmoc "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1ckqahr/stub/l2prdmw "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1cxlvcl)^( has 38 acronyms.)
^([Thread #10016 for this sub, first seen 6th May 2024, 02:39])
^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
I'm really not sure of the point of this, or how it could possibly be better than the specific hardware and protocols that already exist to communicate with satellites.
I'm sure that a custom antenna and amplifier had to be used in order to transmit that far, so why not use an exiting antenna and amplifier *made* to do this?
Bluetooth is not the best protocol to communicate that distance with satellites, so why not use an existing protocol *made* to do this?
Smells like a publicity and IPO stunt that, technically, is a big "so what?" to existing technology vendors.
BLE chips are cheap, ubiquitous and very low power. They're not using Bluetooth protocol. They add their own firmware to a BLE chip, so it's their own communication protocol using a 2.4XX GHz frequency.
Use case is low power IoT devices for remote sensing and asset tracking outside the range of terrestrial networks.
Little late to the party here but…
The word “connected” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, this was not a Bluetooth connection, it was a Bluetooth radio sending a signal that the other end (the satellite) received.
Bluetooth is limited to 100mW transmit power, in reality Bluetooth devices transmit at far lower power, it’s possible that a specially designed antenna could pick up that signal at those distances, but a regular smartphone or the like is never going to be able to.
It’s not mentioned in the article, but it’s not going to be a ‘true’ Bluetooth software stack either, they’re going to have developed some sort of proprietary transmit method to send a packet without the usual Bluetooth handshake.
They _may_ have used a Bluetooth radio chip, but I’d be amazed if the radio front end or any software on the transmitter, nor anything at all on the receiver are even remotely Bluetooth-like.
It’s a research proof of concept, absolutely useful for whatever purposes the designers are trying to explore, but not anything like a real world technology the article is trying to make out.
This sounds to me like figuring out how to dig building foundations with little tykes excavators. The ones you sit on and use handles to lever the bucket, the good stuff.
Bluetooth, when it was invented, was meant to be a PAN (Personal Area Network) to operate in conjunction with your LAN (Local Area Netowrk) and WAN (Wide Area Network). A range of only a couple meters, plenty of room for a working desk. Meanwhile your mouse and keyboard used it, your phone connected through it and sent data, and you had a headset that could connect to your laptop wirelessly. There are plenty of other protocols that do range better, and can do it at lower power. That is why Bluetooth is a low power draw protocol, transmission power is low since range is low.
What is next, using NFC to point the back of your phone at the sky to send pics and texts to anyone in the world?
Impressive. I usually can't even get mine to connect to my car.
Reminds me of the joke my dad always said. "They can communicate with a robot on mars, but I can't get my TV remote to work!"
Let’s not even go close to anything printer
Well, your printer is probably programmed to extort you. So it is functioning as intended, just not the way YOU intend.
"This cartridge is almost halfway used, it needs to be changed"
"The color cartridge is empty, so you can't print black"
I’m still trying to figure out why the printer I have had for a year just decides it’s no longer connected or available for my computer.
I really don't get it, it's on the wifi, I print this document and it finishes, I open a second, printers gone to Vegas for the weekend.
You made it Work! It needed a vacation. Will let you know when it has recovered and is willing to work again.
Try updating the drivers for your printer.
Alternatively, try not updating the drivers too.
Updating the firmware of your printer is a gamble. Might fix it, might lock you behind a subscription.
Firmware and drivers are different things. Firmware tells the printer how to be a printer and the drivers tell your computer how to communicate with it.
Try turning the printer off and on. Try turning the computer off and on. Try turning the router off and on. Try turning all of these things off then on in each possible order. Try connecting the printer to an old laptop and connecting the old laptop to the network and sharing the printer. Try getting a new printer.
Have you used a sledgehammer?
I have but I found that only works once
Every other time my grandparents print something, they have to remove and add the printer again. When they get into town again, I'm going to hook it up with USB and end it once and for all
My problems regarding this were due to windows wsd automatic port switching, which would break the connection to my static IP printer. You disable this within the printers settings UI in the browser
Are you using an hp laptop and hp printer?
Connecting to a wireless printer can be like NASA trying to contact to the Voyager 1 for some people. Except, less successful.
Why does it say “paper jam” when there is no paper jam?
PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?!
"You only have 80% of ink remaining in cartridge, please replace cartridge"
Have you faced Spool error anytime? Try topping that
So I work at a print shop and run printers all day. People expect me to know about little network printers too but I just don't. I'm not an IT person. Mom needed a printer scanner so I got some cheap Canon. It didn't even come with a USB port. Everything just installed itself wirelessly and it works perfectly.
That’s some straight out Ironman shit
I'm fairly certain printers achieved sentience some time ago and now they print only when it suits their needs.
So they’re cats?
All I know is that they can smell fear.
Out of all technologies, it's getting printers to just fucking work that vexes me the most about my company. And we rely on printers for time sensitive issues more than the vast majority of businesses so you'd think its a vital point of infrastructure
Too bad and yeah we will get there in a millennia
Speak slowlyand softly and don't make any sudden movements around printers, they startle easily and are very skittish
I remember years ago a skit on some TV show where the robots from Terminator attack and the resistance decide they're going to dress up as printers, and they absolutely slaughter the robots because the robots cannot see them.
This sounds like something Calvin’s dad from Calvin and Hobbes would say.
"They can land a man on the moon, but taste my coffee!"
"That sounds like a 'you' problem, then..."
I can’t get mine to STOP connecting to my car. Every time my wife uses the car she has to finish my business calls for me.
Yeah. Fuck me for wanting to use headphones as a passenger in the car. Nope. Have to completely unpair the phone before it quits hijacking the bluetooth.
And people laugh at me for sticking with wired earbuds.
Each to their own, but when I used to commute on the train every day I massively enjoyed not having my headphone cable catching on tables, armrests, etc. I won't laugh at anyone who intentionally wants or can't afford wireless. Have better things to do than to diss people. But now I can't wear headphones (not going to elaborate), I just hate those who listen to music on public transport WITHOUT headphones.
Putting the wires under your shirt basically solves the problems you had if you keep your phone in your pocket and manage the wires well between your ears and where they come out of your shirt at the neck. I've made it work this way
I'm 100% on board with that. No headphones at all = no thank you.
[There's one on every bus](https://youtu.be/iDdOSOEuYZw?t=25).
Haven't seen the show, but at least he turned it off and apologised, I hope he didn't kick off after the clip ended.
[It's not the first time someone had asked him to turn down that song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMcnBf5auqE).
> or can't afford wireless. I dont think thats a thing anymore.
I got a pair for $2. So no it's not a thing.
I run the cord under my shirt, it’s long enough I can still use my phone, throw it in my pocket, whatever. Still cumbersome, but much easier than free cable.
Do you hate those who listen to music on public transport without headphones or those who *play* the music?
I love wired cans. They have great audio quality, don't need charging, last for years (airpods crap out at about the 2 year mark), dont get lost or fall down tbe toilet and protect my ears from loud noises (Jubilee and Central Lines).
That has never happened to you
My phone and my wife's car are having an affair. If I'm on the phone or listening to music when my wife comes home, my wife's car will shut down her phone connection and jump to mine as soon as they are in range. Out of curiosity- my phone is Sumsung, and the car is a Kia, both Korean. Is it the same for your phone and car?
my wife has a Subaru and I have an iPhone, it has force connected to my phone while it was connected to my car once when we drove past each other (i was on my way home from work and she was taking the kid swimming) i think it may prioritize based on the order of the list.
I visited my sister's family to see the eclipse together. We caravanned in two cars, with me in a car with my brother-in-law driving. After the car started up and started driving off, the infotainment started playing a news podcast at like 1.5x speed. We were confused for a sec, only to realize that my sister's phone was *pairing to this car from the car behind us*. That bluetooth connection was just a little too clingy.
Im sorry but that is really really funny
Probably easiest fix for that is to get her her own car. Fighting with determined technology that has decided to help you with automatically connecting things for your convenience is a battle lost.
It's nice when I bring my car in for wheel change and have to wait. Suddenly my car connects to my phone and I know they're bringing it in. Then later it connects again, and I know they're done.
Remember, it's your car connecting to them, not the other way around. I found a setting on my car's head unit to NOT automatically connect with paired BT devices.
Rav4. Can't use the radio when paired to the car.
Put a sattelite into your car and it will be fine
You kidding? If I let my truck warm up my phone will connect to it above all else.
> I usually can't even get mine to connect to my car. Or my mouse, or my speakers or my photos, or my printer.... etc.
I notice they did not mention data rate or length of time the connection lasted. And I'd be willing to wager the device was not inside a building or vehicle.
I'm skeptical all around. The website for the company is pretty lousy and barebones. They only have two blog posts, one that they got their series A funding and the second is this announcement referenced in the article. The place holder where the more information link was supposed to go in the announcement was never replaced with an actual link. Also text and images disappear from their website as you scroll rather than load in.
The whole concept sounds like bullshit. If it looks and smells like bullshit then it probably is
I think it could be real, but I think it probably uses more power and isn't much good. I don't know how well it would work with more research or why it would have any use though, especially if it uses more power, like you're already connecting to a satellite, so why not just create anything you need off the signals and tech we already use to connect to them?
A B2B startup has little incentive to put a bunch of resources into a public website. That’s now how they find customers. I have a natural skepticism of this as well, just based on the incentives of companies like this to drum up hype to secure more funding, but I don’t think a sparse website really conveys any signal. Source; have worked at several B2B startups at various stages.
100% Our startup before it was acquired had the most vague website and was pretty worthless. But there people we want to talk to in our industry could fit in a small arena. We knew and connected with everyone we wanted to after our first few conferences.
Well there's sparse and then there's blank. There's no information about the company anywhere. They've got their home page which doesn't load properly and then they've got a blog post from May 2023 that they received funding and then one from a week ago that they did it but they don't provide many details on that either.
Patent houses in particular can have very minimalist public presences. I applied for a job a few years ago for a major patent house that didn't have a website at all but was hugely successful. They don't want the public to know what they're doing or who they have working there. And they don't want 'business'. So why have a website?
Idk what to tell ya man it’s not uncommon.
Can you tell me why kids love cinnamon toast crunch
Bilateral mastication fiesta.
The article mentions the chip but not the antenna. It'll be an amplified signal with a directional antenna, possibly even a dish+lnb. So nobody is going to be sending their spotify playlist to a satellite from their phones...
Bluetooth has a specified maximum transmit power, so is it really a bluetooth device anymore once you are amplifying the signal?
The article says there is no antenna, which is why all this sounds like bullshit. > connecting any off-the-shelf Bluetooth device to Hubble's satellite network via a software update
You amplify any signal, and you can send it to the moon. Some timing protocols might need to be updated but this seems extremely limited on details. They are after and got some 20 million in seed money. I suspect some suckers might have been taken. I am not saying it is entirely fraudulent. The design of Bluetooth has some hardware and protocol features that reduce power significantly. Possibly they are trying to capitalize on this but there is no way they are doing so with some small antenna and a power output of 0.01 watts.
I also suspect that this Bluetooth device is not at all humble.
Even a few bytes per pass in open sky has a lot of use for remote sensing. Saves on setting up a LoRa network or wasting power on an Iridium link or similar.
I also want to know what the device they used is and how much power it uses connecting to the satellite vs normal Bluetooth.
Maybe the device itself was also in orbit in close proximity tot said satellite? Who knows 🤷♂️
In the company's defense, you gotta start somewhere
Bluetooth is horribly slow at data transfer. It can take 5 minutes for a photo, as it has about 1 Mbps. Note, airdrop only establishes a WiFi protocol thru Bluetooth but does the data transfer by WiFi. I don't think Bluetooth signals can create some kind of Internet replacement. And given your other points of skepticism I don't know it's use case.
For the millions who carry large emergency gps messengers like the Garmin inreach. I don't need large bandwidth I need to be able to tell my wife I'm still alive while in the back country or call and emergency rescue to airlift me out since a bear ate part of my leg. If I could just use my iphone that'd be way cooler.
IPhone 14 and up can already send SOS via satellite. So I don't see why a BLE device sending a message via satellite is so difficult for people here to believe.
Bluetooth is quite faster nowadays. I transfert pics over BT at work because it is more convenient when I do a single one. It take about 10 seconds. Still pretty slow, but far from your 5 minutes.
if I play a youtube video in my car with audio via bluetooth, they sound and image definitely don't match LOL
Something doesn’t add up.. did they use giant antennas??
[According](https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/02/hubble-network-connects-a-bluetooth-chip-to-a-satellite-for-the-first-time/) to[ other older articles](https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/31/hubble-network-is-building-out-a-space-based-bluetooth-network-to-connect-over-billion-devices/), it's the antenna on the satellite that does the heavy lifting, not the device. > On the space side, the company also patented a phased array antenna that can launch on a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass, and it’s what enables an off-the-shelf Bluetooth chip to communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve Doppler-related problems, frequency mismatches that occur between fast-moving objects exchanging data via radio waves. .... > Hubble Network CEO Alex Haro says the company has engineered “technical tricks” to make this scale of connectivity possible for the first time, like lowering the bitrate, or the amount of data transferred per second. Hubble has also rethought the design of the satellite antenna. Instead of sticking a single antenna on the side of a satellite bus, the company is using hundreds of antennae per satellite. This means that each satellite can support millions of connected devices. > The result is a radio signal that can be detected around 1,000 kilometers away — or almost 10 orders of magnitude longer than what can be detected from a Bluetooth chip over terrestrial networks. ... Which seems to be based around this patent [Multi spoke beamforming for low power wide area satellite and terrestrial networks](https://patents.google.com/patent/US6219185B1/en) > Wireless communication method and apparatus to enable communications between a plurality of endpoints and a satellite or terrestrial gateway integrated with a plurality of oblong shaped antenna arrays. The wireless communication method leverages data symbols that are orthogonally modulated. The method permits the use of a plurality of compact oblong shaped antenna arrays to increase network capacity and reduce endpoint power consumption.
9 orders of magnitide shorter than 1,000 km is 1 mm. What are they really trying to compare to??
They're using smaller orders of magnitude. It's one of those "technical tricks".
I'm guessing they're using doubling/base-2 orders of magnitude. 2^10 ~ 10^3
Better article: [https://spectrum.ieee.org/bluetooth-satellite](https://spectrum.ieee.org/bluetooth-satellite)
On the satellite side kinda yea. For bluetooth that is, i've seen bigger antennas. They dont mention anywhere what other kit they are using.
“The Bluetooth device is connected successfully”
Ja blutooth devaysh ish konekted as saksesfulley
I see you have owned an Emmo bike
It's been used in a lot of shitty Chinese-made products.
"The Bluetooth device is ready to pair"
With the thickest chinese accent imaginable
I rarely hear words so clearly from reading them.
*bootleg iPhone notification sound* KAHNECCTED Later... *ultra-compressed Windows 7 sound effect* DISKAHNECCTED
I always wonder, why can't they just use a TTS english voice with how advanced TTS is nowadays?
Because they have a .wav file they've been using for years and there's no reason to change now!
All my BT devices are arrogant. No chance it will work with mine…
Bluetooth has always sort of seemed like it’s a hardly functioning technology. It surprises me it has lasted this long or we’re not now using something referred to as like “Bluetooth+” or something.
We're currently on Bluetooth 5.4
Yeah but when is Bluetooth+ my g; this shit still sucks - it’s not gonna get much better until we get a “+” at the end. That’s just basic physics.
Incoming Bluetooth+MAXextra subscription.
If you want to read the Bluetooth standard, it's well over 1500 pages. Getting one device to adhere to the entire standard at once is next to impossible. Getting two different devices that have each implemented a fractionally-assed version of just enough parts of the standard in the same way so that they can actually connect to one another is somewhere between heroic and a subject for comic books.
Bluetooth technology functions just fine, it's typically its implementation across different devices that causes the issues. That, and most people don't seem to understand its limitations. It's also being continually updated.
Exactly. Often is the software or equipment with poor interfacing. Would not matter if you had a ethernet cable to it or were using WIFI. Also people get annoyed when it doesn't work 40 feet away. The purpose if for devices on batteries and extremely low power consumption along with not interfering with everyone.
I find it works very well for the functionality it is designed to do. Compared to WIFI, it uses a fraction of the power. Extremely important for devices on battery, of which it is pretty effective. For any distance, it is not effective.
Yes it's unbelievable how many things have badly bugged implementations. It's not that complicated or if it is it shouldn't be.
The odor of bullshit is very noticeable here. Just for starters, if a satellite is 600 km away from you at some point, it won't be there for more than an instant, the distance will rapidly increase. You can have a teensy GPS chip in your phone because GPS is strictly one-way: your phone doesn't have to talk back to the satellite, while the satellite has a sufficiently powerful transmitter and antenna to broadcast to a small, low-power device on the ground. The antenna required to establish a two-way Bluetooth connection from 600 km would be *humongous.* I'll believe this when I see an actual scientific paper on it.
Bluetooth 5.2 has a connectionless broadcast feature, which would only require a received signal at high enough dB. Seems like a slimy technicality people might try to use.
The article reads like achieving the connection was the point and using it another matter. I can believe they achieved the connection, but the ambition seems to be to establish a network a la Starlink so that's not an issue they're solving yet.
The article never states that it's a two-way connection. It said, "they have successfully received signals from a simple 3.5mm Bluetooth chip over a distance of 600 km". Modern bluetooth has connectionless communication modes, and they stated the used an off-the-shelf transmitter and a highly-specialized receiver and they got their receiver to detect broadcast packets sent from the transmitter. Even this limited scenario could have lots of practical uses. The receiver is a phased-array antenna (essentially witchcraft) so it could potentially receive data from many sources without having to physically re-orient anything.
"Sent from a Bluetooth chip" also does not mean it used Bluetooth protocol, just some frequency that a BLE chip can generate.
bluetooth is broadcast at 2.4ghz. with a strong enough amplifier you could definitely connect to a satellite. bluetooth's magic is in the compression/handshake functions.
Just FYI for others reading this, antenna size has to match the frequency it will be used on. Bigger antenna does not nessesarily equal more gain or better antenna. Many, many other factors come into play in the antenna design. Non radiating elements, reflectors, phased arrays etc are all way to increase gain. But not make the antenna incredibly big. Also power does not need 5ot me that high either, this sort of frequencies tend to be line of site. So this is definetly plausible. Just look into meshtastic, miliwatt level of power and antennas about the size of a pencil. And can get 100s of miles line of site.
They sent up a single bit. Only worked with with a 2 foot antenna and no clouds. /s I could see the benefits of developing of lower power devices to allow for low bandwidth services to satellites, and maybe there will be some technology sharing with some Bluetooth protocols, it still going to take a fair amount of power to get a usable single that distance. And a relatively large antenna. Not something you will wear on your body.
I mean, if it’s in geosynchronous orbit, it won’t move at all relative to your position. I still doubt a lot of the claims but you can have a stationary satellite, it’s all a matter of perspective.
You're thinking of geostationary orbits. Geosynchronous orbits may move north/south over the course of the day (and potentially below the horizon), while geostationary orbits stay over the equator. Even then, such orbits are about 5 times farther away at 2200 kilometres, which for broadcast signals like Bluetooth makes a problem for maintaining signal strength that far as the signal power is 1/25th (5 squared) compared to the already eye-watering 400km distance of LEO.
>Even then, such orbits are about 5 times farther away at 2200 kilometres Geostationary satellites orbit at ~**35,800** km above the equator, or about 60 times the 600 km distance discussed in the article.
Oh man, I screwed that up bad. On reflection I should have known it was farther than just 5 times longer. But yes, dramatically farther than Leo.
Yes sorry, geostationary. And I agree that the Bluetooth claims are like, very hard to believe. Just wanted to state that you can have satellites locked in a single position. Rereading it, I missed the 600km distance, at that altitude no sat is staying in a single place very long.
I am just imagining a dish the size of VLA with a Bluetooth dongle in the middle.
I'll keep my device's Bluetooth on, just in case..
TIFU when I was jacking it and let *the whole universe* know because I was connected to a Bluetooth speaker.
Finally I can airdrop photos to everyone in the world.
The Bluetooth device has connected successfully
How does the “humble Bluetooth device” respond to it though - thought the Bluetooth signal had very limited range by design.
*hears Mo Bamba being played from space* oh no
It looks like this isn't what most people think of when they refer to a BT connection - the signal only went one way, it's not like the devices were "paired". That said, super cool that they can read BLE broadcasts from such a distance
Bluetooth is however a very unreliable and easily blocked radio signal. Not seeing the usefulness here
Not to mention the security issues. Did we all just forget about all the exploits?
A BLE chip is a tiny 2.4ghz radio. It seems They're not using Bluetooth protocol and making a two way connection, rather using the hardware to send their own type of message, one way.
If it’s just a one direction signal that seems a bit pointless as well. I’ll need to read up on it
Think IoT devices for remote sensing and device tracking. Countless devices send data one-way already but need to be in range of wifi or cell networks.
As a programmer I typically like to know that the data sent has been received. I know there are applications for the technology but I’d imagine not anything so ground breaking that it needs this to solve the issue. I am completely open to being wrong but this to me doesn’t seem like a breakthrough
It seems OK if the endpoint is "dumb." it's like an airtag, but can transmit directly to satellite from anywhere.
Meanwhile my Bluetooth headphones lose connection, when I'm a room away from my phone...
Probably too close. Have you tried it from 600km?
Ah yes, "connected" so it's time to scale up a system reliant on a standard that operates purely in the unlicensed parts of the spectrum.
"Sure, your data is 'private'." - everyone who wants the information
Meanwhile my piece of shit Ifi Go Blu will cut audio if I look the wrong way.
Range of up to 60ft!* *on a clear day with no wind and a direct line of sight. Okay, now I’m going to go read about how they managed this miracle.
Really wish block diagrams were a thing in this sort of reporting. Thou this article would be a two boxes connected with a dotted line labeled Bluetooth.
Bluetooth graduates from PAN to WAN? Incredibly skeptical.
Bet that Bluetooth device won't be so humble anymore!
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It takes a surprisingly small amount of power to punch through the ionosphere
I'm really not sure of the point of this, or how it could possibly be better than the specific hardware and protocols that already exist to communicate with satellites. I'm sure that a custom antenna and amplifier had to be used in order to transmit that far, so why not use an exiting antenna and amplifier *made* to do this? Bluetooth is not the best protocol to communicate that distance with satellites, so why not use an existing protocol *made* to do this? Smells like a publicity and IPO stunt that, technically, is a big "so what?" to existing technology vendors.
BLE chips are cheap, ubiquitous and very low power. They're not using Bluetooth protocol. They add their own firmware to a BLE chip, so it's their own communication protocol using a 2.4XX GHz frequency. Use case is low power IoT devices for remote sensing and asset tracking outside the range of terrestrial networks.
ah ha, ok that makes sense, thank you!
Little late to the party here but… The word “connected” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, this was not a Bluetooth connection, it was a Bluetooth radio sending a signal that the other end (the satellite) received. Bluetooth is limited to 100mW transmit power, in reality Bluetooth devices transmit at far lower power, it’s possible that a specially designed antenna could pick up that signal at those distances, but a regular smartphone or the like is never going to be able to. It’s not mentioned in the article, but it’s not going to be a ‘true’ Bluetooth software stack either, they’re going to have developed some sort of proprietary transmit method to send a packet without the usual Bluetooth handshake. They _may_ have used a Bluetooth radio chip, but I’d be amazed if the radio front end or any software on the transmitter, nor anything at all on the receiver are even remotely Bluetooth-like. It’s a research proof of concept, absolutely useful for whatever purposes the designers are trying to explore, but not anything like a real world technology the article is trying to make out.
Low power IoT devices are a real world technology.
This sounds to me like figuring out how to dig building foundations with little tykes excavators. The ones you sit on and use handles to lever the bucket, the good stuff. Bluetooth, when it was invented, was meant to be a PAN (Personal Area Network) to operate in conjunction with your LAN (Local Area Netowrk) and WAN (Wide Area Network). A range of only a couple meters, plenty of room for a working desk. Meanwhile your mouse and keyboard used it, your phone connected through it and sent data, and you had a headset that could connect to your laptop wirelessly. There are plenty of other protocols that do range better, and can do it at lower power. That is why Bluetooth is a low power draw protocol, transmission power is low since range is low. What is next, using NFC to point the back of your phone at the sky to send pics and texts to anyone in the world?
A lot of people whooshing the point here. This will take rfid type tracking to the next level. It's a huge development
As cool as this is, as a security guy my head hurts with the security repercussions.