One of my biggest frustrations with the Mac Mini has been using the mouse… the Bluetooth Wireless Mouse actually…
The pointer movement just wasn’t smooth enough… just not as responsive as it is on Windows…
I first blamed it on using PowerPC applications with Rosetta being so processor intensive that the mouse driver had problems actually tracking the mouse movement. But no, that’s an explanation I have to keep for poor video playback on exotic formats. Mouse movement also skips when the Mac is idle.
I also blamed it on some background task like a file indexing daemon. But again, that’s a poor explanation. (I still have to figure out how to ps -aux on the Mac though ;))
I finally blamed it on the Bluetooth… and I wonder why it took me so long to fgure that out. When the mouse starts skipping, all I have to do is get closer to the Mac and the mouse will instantly work smoothly again.
The sad thing here is that I’m not so far away with my mouse! I’m only using it from accross my living room… which means 2-3 meters away from the Mac. With a straight line of sight!
I thought Bluetooth was supposed to have a 10 meter operating range! Well it seems the Apple Mouse only has a 2 meters operating range. Such a shame!
I occasionally get Bluetooth disconnects of the wireless keyboard also, but those have never bothered me that much. Maybe I just don’t realize each keypress has to be retransmitted 4 or 5 times! ?
Now I have 2 options: either I move the couch closer to the TV (should have bought a smaller one! :-/) or I find a way to improve the Bluetooth… I wonder if you can boost it someway! Sure you can’t connect an external Bluetooth antenna to the Mac Mini… but I wonder if putting some metallic object at a very specific spot on the Mini could actually act as an amplifying antenna… :roll:
Comments from long ago:
Comment from: Kochise
Probably just a question of battery power. Try to switch your mouse to 12V (car battery for instance)… Yup, it’s less confortable to move around your mouse, but the BlueTooth transiever should just be happy and now broadcast in a range, say… 1 km around ? I’m sure the neighborhood will be happy to see their own mouse cursor without interaction.
Kochise
2006-07-26 18-10
Comment from: François Planque
:))
2006-07-26 18-29
Comment from: Mox Folder
Maybe you could try with another brands like logitech…
2006-07-29 23-43
Comment from: François Planque
Well I actually don’t want to buy a (comparatively ugly) Logitech Bluetooth mouse just for the sake of testing it’s emission power… I’d so much rather buy a Wireless Mighty Mouse now that they’re out! :P
2006-08-02 09-53
Comment from: kenvil
bluetooth technology works flow:
Overview of Operation
The Bluetooth RF (physical layer) operates in the unlicensed ISM band at 2.4GHz. The system employs a frequency hop transceiver to combat interference and fading, and provides many FHSS carriers. RF operation uses a shaped, binary frequency modulation to minimize transceiver complexity. The symbol
rate is 1 Megasymbol per second (Msps) supporting the bit rate of 1 Megabit per second (Mbps) or, with Enhanced Data Rate, a gross air bit rate of 2 or 3Mb/s. These modes are known as Basic Rate and Enhanced Data Rate respectively.
……to learn more bluetooth knowledge,please reference
http://www.bonphi.com/knowledge.html
2006-08-15 07-21