Bluetooth over ethernet with POE esp board

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
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I got sick of steam link’s latency and had some left over hardware and claude subscription at hand to solve this. With optical hdmi and poe esp board I managed to get fully working remote gaming setup from my rack to living room. The controller inputs feel exactly the same as it feels next to the machine with mb’s bt adapter. Here’s the site: esp-hci-bridge and git repo: GitHub - heppu/hcibridge: ESP32-POE as a remote Bluetooth controller over Ethernet, Zig firmware logic and host daemon · GitHub

I’m planning to use this with also with my homeassistant server to get rid of esp home setup and have plane remote bt adapters.

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very interesting project! this might genuinely improve my day-to-day workflow. what are the advantages of this setup over simply USBoIP of the bluetooth dongle?

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Couple advantages:

  1. Cheaper: USB/IP needs a Pi or what ever board running Linux, usbipd, a dongle. This needs just simple esp board so cheaper and less moving parts.

  2. Better protocol over wire: bt packets vs USB transactions. A BT dongle gets polled every millisecond over USB, and USB/IP turns each of those into a network round trip, so you get jitter and sometimes things like audio break.s Here a button press is one HCI packet, one hop.

  3. More robust: When USB/IP drops, the device detaches, the adapter disappears from BlueZ and you reattach by hand. Here the link reconnects on its own, bonds live on the board, and devices come back without you touching anything. Plus it’s authenticated with a per-board key, USB/IP is open TCP for anyone on the LAN.

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