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HP Introduces A Bluetooth Printer
man_ls writes: "I found this on C|Net, it's an HP Printer that also supports Bluetooth. You can read about it here. Not that the Bluetooth will do anything except interfere with 802.11 wireless networks, but it's an interesting feature to have." Actually, Bluetooth shouldn't interfere with 802.11 except in confusing product marketing, right? Nice to see that at least one printer will actually hit the market with a short-range radio interface instead of wire (inconvenient) or IR (poor interoperability).
Don't forget that with kernel 2.4.17mb22 you too can use this printer.
Sincerely, Mike Bouma (Linux Kernel Hacker)
PS: Yep, I did it before Alan Cox
From the article, "While we haven't had a chance to test the DeskJet 995C, ..."
Ummm, this may as well be an HP press release.
Bluetooth does interfere with 802.11- they are both using the same 2.4 GHz band (as a bunch of other things too) but they do interfere- they don't completely knock each other out, but they will degrade each other's range and total throughput. I wish I had a good reference for it- my information comes from a talk I heard from a guy on the Bluetooth committee. That 2.4 GHz band is a free-for-all. Telephones, Bluetooth, 802.11, wireless cameras, and whatever the next big thing is. You only have so much bandwidth, and you have to share.
As a cable to something like a printer- yep, that's the whole idea behind bluetooth- as a way to eliminate wires, and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of it. Eliminating wires is just the beginning- the real amazing stuff will come when things are truly interconnected and it's cheap- cheap really is the selling point behind bluetooth. The manufacturers I've talked to have a goal of about a $5.00 cost for the bluetooth solution. When we get there (802.11 is a more complex solution that is aimed for the higher end, and that is getting pretty cheap- the cards are way under $100, which means that the chipsets are probably under $20). Aside from the irritating marketing potential, having everthing interconnected is the way things are going- where you don't have to worry about synchronizing your Palm Pilot and your phone with your computer, they do it automatically when you're nearby.
Bluetooth has the potential to really change the way computers work with everything- we just have to see if it will really happen. It's not the only thing that we need- and it won't happen tomorrow.
This is starting to get somewhat offtopic, but
I've had bad experiences trying to mix a Logitech Cordless Keyboard/Mouse (Freedom Pro? I believe was the moniker) with 802.11 Wireless LAN cards (D-Link PCI/PCMCIA cards).
I tried to mix the two when creating a 'set-top box' type computer system for TV use -- mostly to play MAME games and such on the big screen, but I added an 802.11 card and cordless key/mouse for some comfy web surfing.
At any rate, I had tons of connection problems with from the 802.11 in this machine to the 802.11 access point even though they were well within 802.11 range with very little obstruction..On a hunch I pulled out the cordless keyboard/mouse system and shelved it and the connection problems went away. I wish these devices were a bit smarter about collisions and finding some way to avoid them.
Yeah, a network interface on a printer is often a cause of trouble. It's bad enough if it has an open lpr port where anyone can print to it - you end up having to firewall the printer to stop unauthorized printing. It's worse if there is some fancy-schmancy 'control panel' available with a web browser; again, either there's no security or at best it involves a plaintext password.
And the sophisticated queuing software installed on many printers tends to crash, with no way to fix the problem (since you don't have the source).
But none of this is necessary. It would be much easier just to have a parallel port connected to a print server (which you will probably need anyway) and do any queuing or other fun stuff on the print server, with software you can fix, on an operating system you're familiar with. Removing an extra layer of queuing (the printer's own queue) would also lessen the black-hole-ness of submitting a print job and make it easier to cancel or promote jobs (can be done on the print server). Cutting out the unncessarily bloated firmware would probably make the printer a bit cheaper also.
The only intelligence that needs to be on the printer is a PostScript rasterizer, and even that isn't necessary if you can get a 600dpi bitmap page to the printer fast enough. It's a shame that SCSI-based printing never really took off. Although parport is pretty fast these days too.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Some Carnegie Mellon University folks conducted this experiment (PDF format). A continuously-operating Bluetooth link in close proximity to an 802.11 link caused a few percent 802.11 packet loss, and sometimes caused the 802.11 link to fallback to lower data rates. This is even with one of the 802.11 nodes right between the BT nodes, which were 6 feet apart. Sounds tolerable to me...