Wireless usb.

[pete10uk]

I gues this must have been done before but I can’t find an answer.

 

I’m looking and find it hard to believe that it doesn’t exist, however I’m having difficulty finding something.

 

I’m looking for a hardware wireless usb extender. 15-20m range and ideally usb powered. Just looking to be able to take a laptop foh to colour balance a video wall with out running a long cable or moving the processor to do it.

 

There is budget, looking for an easy plug and play suggestion.

 

Thanks

[J Pearce]

You might be better leaving the laptop at control, and using a tablet or another laptop to remote control the first laptop over VNC or RDP over wifi. Edited June 13, 2021 by J Pearce

[Andrew C]

I too have looked for wireless USB without success. I think the data rates are just too high for anyone to put out "this'll do any USB you throw at it" equipment.

 

I too have looked for wireless USB without success. I think the data rates are just too high for anyone to put out "this'll do any USB you throw at it" equipment.

[pete10uk]

I don’t know enough about usb but I would say most applications requiring wireless capabilities are probably on the lower side of data requirements, or at least they should be, if your trying to use a usb-c sd hd wirelessly, you deserve all that wireless throws at you.

 

I was hoping I could get it to work easily with hardware like I can with full hd video.

 

Barco clickshare do wireless usb for webcams on the cx30 units and above, not sure if it would work for general usb and I don’t fancy the £2.5k price tag.

 

I guess it. 20m active cable or seeing if a wifi router with usb works!

 

Thanks for the input.

[sleah]

I guess it. 20m active cable or seeing if a wifi router with usb works!

USB sockets on routers are normally for either 3/4/5G dongles, printers or storage (usb/hd/ssd) so I doubt very much you could sucessfully connect anything else to them :(

[richardash1981]

There have been attempts at a generic USB over IP layer (which could (maybe) then be carried over WiFi), but never seem to have achieved mainstream traction: https://github.com/cezanne/usbip-win

 

I'm sure I have seen commercial USB-over-Ethernet devices, maybe attach one of them to the router's Ethernet port? They must come with Windows support of some sort, buyer beware!

 

Performance is pretty poor for USB devices which rely upon low latency (and limited by the available WiFi or Ethernet bandwidth), which means you are in suck-it-and-see territory - the implementation won't pass an USB conformance tests (because the USB protocol has very strict latency requirements), but quite a lot of device drivers work in spite of that.

 

(edited with more up to date link)

 

Edited June 14, 2021 by richardash1981

[timsabre]

USB is really not designed for this at the hardware level, there is no allowance for any delays, latency or errors, so long cables (or radio links) just don't work at anything above the lowest data speeds. I guess this is why the device you are looking for does not exist.

Active cables over 5m are USB2.0 only and even then lots of things don't work, in my experience.

You can get USB 2.0 over CAT5 (not ethernet/IP, just using a CAT5 cable) e.g. https://www.lindy.co.uk/usb-c4/60m-4-port-usb-2-0-cat-5-extender-p10421but again these quite often seem to not work with some devices.

 

The suggestion to remotely control a laptop by VNC is the best one.

Edited June 14, 2021 by timsabre

[dje]

The suggestion to remotely control a laptop by VNC is the best one.

 

I agree. And to add to that (as this is something I'm currently doing) - even if you're not in a position to use the wifi, or the wifi doesn't have the range to achieve this over the LAN, you can do it over the internet using Teamviewer.

[sameness]

Just looking to be able to take a laptop foh to colour balance a video wall with out running a long cable or moving the processor to do it.

 

 

Easiest way, that I have been using for this exact application on events both small and large for years without fail is leaving one laptop directly attached to the processors and then remote in using Teamviewer/RemotePC/etc and connect that way.

 

Buy yourself a decent AP and create your own network

[mac.calder]

USB2.0 over ethernet is relatively easy actually. Extron and Crestron both do extenders capable of this (they also do point to point - but their networked stuff can do virtual USB hubs etc... it's kinda cool). KVM over IP is also very doable.

 

Bandwidth wise, you need 480mb/s to get USB2.0 speeds. So technically a 802.11AC can do it (ehhh... very iffy, and needs a lot of tinkering). Wifi6 can definitely do it if correctly configured. But you would need to bridge between access points and then use the hardware at either end. There is a BIG but in here though - some devices are fussy. Extenders can also count as 2 devices in the 7 device limit of USB (depending on the extender)... so that can be a real pain.

 

And lets not talk about usb3 extension - and the fact that USB4 is just around the corner.