BLE Direct to PC/macOS?

togumetogume United States
in Cyton
We're running out of USB ports on a project we're working on and had the idea of going straight from the Cyton to the PC without the USB Dongle. I just spent time looking at the docs and forums and came up empty-handed. For some reason, I recall looking into this in the past, but I can't remember what it was.

Is this possible? If so, is there any documentation I missed on how to do this?

Comments

  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    Hi Togume, 

    "We're running out of USB ports on a project we're working on..." USB hubs and ports are almost infinitely extendable on PC's, with the proper use of powered USB hubs. In fact a hub can be connected to a hub in a nested fashion.

    Regarding Cyton BLE. This does exist, but very limited bandwidth. See,


    Regards,

    William

  • togumetogume United States
    edited May 2019
    @wjcroft - not for what we're using it for... We have a powered 4x hub and we can only take advantage of 2x ports before running into issues and therefore have to use multiple controllers on the computer.

    Thanks for that link. I'd run across that, but given it's from 2017, I hoped there was something newer.

    Thanks for your helpful reply per usual!
  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    re: hubs. Did you understand that you can have this configuration:

    PC -- HUB (with 4 or 8 ports, one of which goes to next hub) -- HUB (with 4 or 8 ports)

    In other words with say 2 hubs, you could have around 15 USB devices.

    re: BLE post from AJ, I would check the referenced Github links.
  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    Be sure your hubs are the latest types, supporting whatever physical connectors you need, as well as USB C or USB 3 (Type A) standards.

    The older USB protocol 1, 1.1 or 2 hubs are now generally obsolete and very speed limited.

    There are also adapters that can convert a USB C female port to a USB 3 female Type A type connector, handling the wiring 
  • togumetogume United States
    Great points, wjcroft! The issue we were running into with the hubs is that as soon as we plugged more than two devices into a hub we would start seeing issues. It's a nice, powered, good branded (Anker) 7x USB 3.0 Type A HUB, but we can only get 2x devices per... go figure.

    I wish we could use USB C everywhere - hopefully that future is near!
  • wjcroftwjcroft Mount Shasta, CA
    You must have a bad hub. I do know that Anker is generally good, but sometimes there are just duds. You could verify that the hub is bad by checking if it does the same thing on another computer. Hubs have different capacities from 4 to 8 ports each.

    Also could be possible your operating system has some glitches. The trial on the other machine should sort that out.
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