Post #4230960
2026-07-30 06:57 UTC
@rmi@cloudisland.nz my strong assumption would be that Bluetooth probably displaced any pre-Bluetooth wireless keyboards from the market decades ago.
The Bluetooth protocol is pretty deliberately designed to be “personal area” (~10m) by radio power, timeouts, and RF frequency.
USB has some very strict timeouts on certain steps, so I suspect a naive “wireless extender” for USB wouldn’t meet those timeouts.
Replies (1)
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@ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz 2026-07-30 06:57
@rmi@cloudisland.nz So you’d need a USB dongle to a custom radio protocol to a battery powered keyboard. (Think old school wireless mouse with dongle.) My guess is maybe ~20 years ago such a thing was findable, but likely not now. Best option these days is probably an embedded device as USB HID device with a custom radio link to an embedded USB (or Bluetooth) host that understands HID. But I’d expect that to need to be 100% DIY, at both ends. (Or very retro USB 1 keyboard dongle and radio keyboard.)