I need to run a USB cable across a hallway but I don’t want people tripping on it. Is there a bluetooth solution to this problem, a transmitter and receiver that looks like a regular USB connection to the computer?
If tripping really is your concern, run it across the ceiling.
If attactiveness is your concern, skip this post.
Wireless USB extenders are starting to come to market. Something like this ought to be suitable for your application.
What kind of devices are you trying to connect?
A bluetooth-dongle (reciever/transmitter) typically needs some kind of interface, so for connecting a printer this wouldn’t be feasible.
Also bandwith is an issue; USB +/- 30 MB/s vs. Bluetooth 0.7 MB/s.
For a printer, you’d be better off getting a WiFi printer or WiFi print server device, assuming you already have a WiFi network.
If you’ve already set up a wireless network, you can connect to external drives and stuff like that if you configure sharing correctly. Bluetooth is not really useful for files bigger than a few tens of megabytes. If you could be more specific about what you want to connect to what, that would help us to give you some advice about solutions.
I want to hook a camera to a computer so I can take a picture and immediately save it to a network drive. I have a Canon Powershot that I can control with a computer (any suggestions for good camera control software would be appreciated too- I found one called PS Remote that seems ok).
I know there are cameras out there with WiFi- anybody have any experience with these?
Sounds like you want to set up a wireless network. You can do what you want with a wireless router (NOT an access point, which requires a hardware router to work properly, unless you’ve already got a router) linked to another computer, or which has capabilities to directly provide access to a hard drive. I’ve heard good things about the Linsys SLU2, and the new Airport Extreme has a USB port for connecting a printer or hard drive. Either one should work with a USB hub if you need to connect several drives and they are not capable of chaining.
If you have another computer besides the one you want to use your camera with, you can probably just configure sharing to provide access to connected drives (physically connected to computer 1) and mount the drive remotely on the second computer. That should give you access to the drive as if it were connected to computer 2 physically. I’ve done this with my home network when I wanted to transfer files from one to the other and didn’t want to disconnect the drive from the main computer. I run Macs mostly, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get Windows to play nice, especially since you’re probably not doing a mixed network.
I haven’t used either the Linksys or the Apple wireless products I linked to, I’ve just heard that they have the capabilities to do what it sounds like you want to do. FTR, my router is a basic Linksys wireless router. I got throughput that was decent enough to transfer fairly large files without waiting ages. Pictures should only take a few seconds apiece, even if you’re transmitting huge RAW files.