Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if overall it works in 90% of cases.

Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with "connection failed".

Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on another phone. Or when the weather is different. What on earth are two devices directly next to each other doing for 60 seconds?

I also have a few BT controlled LEDs where from an app I control brightness and color temperature. My phone is always in range, but the BT connection just doesn't sustain itself. It intermittently drops after which I need to redo the setup again on every single light.

I'm sure the reason is "low power" or "interference" but that doesn't mean anything. It's not actionable. It's fragile and unreliable tech.

I feel the same way - it's so interesting how the lack of a mental model causes such frustration! There's perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" and so on). I wonder why Bluetooth doesn't use them or create its own, and instead just fails to work.

> perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" ...

ACKHSHUALLY, "how many bars" is well known to be very bad indication of network connectivity. Yes, if you have one bar it's probably worse than five, but for example "my phone show five bars and yours only three" is very wrong way to judge -- there's no relative measure.

That's true, but at least the mental model roughly holds. Somebody who is barely technologically literate will understand that "more bars" is better, and that's exactly what the abstraction should do. Communicate something simply at the cost of precision.

We could have the segments of the ᛒ turn on or off based on signal strength

You could actually have the devices too close (overdriving the RF receiver). Or the two antennas are oriented with their null directions facing each other.

My go-to method to get difficult BT gear to pair is to place both devices in the microwave and shut the door. The microwave is a faraday cage for 2.4Ghz, so it removes interference as a potential problem. If it still fails, you can turn on the microwave and enjoy a light show at least.

Often it's a problem with firmware/driver implementation in one of those devices (like speaker), resulting from poor development processes.

Complexity of Bluetooth protocol, multiplied by the speaker price (assuming you have not the really expensive ones) does not help as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com