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tehbeardyesterday at 9:37 AM2 repliesview on HN

They don't mean the absolute real distance between dongle and mouse.

They mean the mouse communicates an absolute position (relative to some arbitrary 0,0 the mouse decides upon) instead of a relative direction.

Dongle can then take latest coord packet and diff it against previous coord packet to get a relative coord to pass via HID to the system.

If the RF packets are lost, some latency occurs but the dongle still has the previous mouse coord and can make a fairly accurate correction once a packet gets thru (get's from A to D, but might skip points B+C).


Replies

pwgyesterday at 1:16 PM

What happens with that "absolute position relative to some arbitrary 0,0 picked by the mouse" when the user picks the mouse up off the table/pad/etc. and repositions it (i.e., they hit the edge of the pad and now "re-center" to continue moving left (or right) on screen). The mouse loses its 0,0 point reference as soon as it is picked up.

It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception of that packet becomes critical to continuing to properly communicate motion to the attached computer.

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freehorseyesterday at 6:25 PM

That sounds like a software problem to me, not one that requires a hardware solution. There is nothing in what you describe that cannot be performed through bluetooth packets.

I am not sure which dongles make these corrections, but my experience with dongles is worse than bluetooth. Typically, a mouse is very close to the bluetooth antenna of a computer, and I have not really experienced any sort of connection issues due to missing packages etc. In contrast, I have had tons of issues with usb dongles due to usb interference.