Long-Range Wireless Keyboard/Mouse?

tambo writes with the sort of problem more people wish they had: "I've just bought myself an excellent LCD TV. I'd love to be able to access my home server from it for many reasons (music, video, surfing, MAME, etc.) — but my home server is in another room, 30 feet away from the TV and 50 feet away from the couch. I've acquired some gear to send PC audio and video wirelessly (over the 5.8GHz range), so that's all good. My challenge now is trying to send input wirelessly to my PC from fifty feet away. I've thought about getting a wireless USB hub, but that would introduce an additional wireless hop that would probably add to the input latency (and might interfere with all the other wireless gear in my pad.) My best bet now is to get a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse that have an unusually good range, and some of the Logitechs seem to qualify, but it's a gamble. Advice?"

or you could just go take a walk...

[Anonymous Coward]

i think this is what they mean by possessions owning the person rather than the other way around.

Build your own set-top box...

[I confirm I'm not a]

I realise you've just spent a fair bit on sending video and audio from the server, and probably don't want to waste that investment, but wouldn't the easiest approach be to have a networked PC under the screen, and use that to connect mouse and keyboard to? You could SSH into your server, or similar?

With this approach you could dedicate the "set-top box" to recording video (handy for the antenna connection or cable box...) and use the server for storing recordings long-term.

Extension cable

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a USB extension cable, plug it into the server, and plug the wireless receiver into that. Run it along the wall as far as is necessary to bring it into range of wherever you use the keyboard.

And on a side note: the couch? Really? I can never quite believe that people are actually comfortable using a computer when they are sat on a couch. That goes double for non-laptops.

use a usb bluetooth adapter on a long extender cab

[alices ice]

use a usb bluetooth adapter on a long extender cable so it's closer to your couch!

My Solution

[pete-classic]

Storage server* in a back room, Mac Mini hooked up to the TV. Added a bluetooth keyboard and Mighty Mouse and I'm set. It's even a DVD player smaller than most! (Can't wait 'till they come out with a Blu-ray model.)

You're making the split at the I/O level. Makes much more sense to me to split at the storage level. Storage is still noisy, processing has gotten pretty quiet. Why fling all those signals around when you can just have one Ethernet backhaul, and keep all the I/O in the same room?

-Peter

*Actually just a Newertech drive plugged into the USB port on my Airport Extreme. I hope to upgrade to a Drobo soon.

The PCjr "chiclet" keyboard

[sakusha]

Oh it's too bad they don't make the old PCjr infrared keyboards anymore. They had an upgraded model that improved on the notorious "chiclet" keyboard, I used to have one, it worked decently. The reason I say it would be perfect for you is that you can now buy "IR extenders" that are designed to carry IR remote control signals into AV equipment inside cabinets. The IR hits a receiver via line of sight, it's converted and sent down a wire, and is retransmitted by an IR LED at the other end of the wire. You could run the extender's wire as far as you like, and still have a wireless keyboard.
Maybe there are other IR keyboards around, but I'm not aware of any. They had a few bugs. For example, if I struck a BIC cigarette lighter near my PCjr, the spark would emit a little IR and the CPU would beep, indicating an unknown IR transmission error.

The canonical solution:

[ettlz]

Cheap notebook, 802.11, SSH and X.

Don't do it.

[Rowan_u]

Save yourself the pain and suffering of input lag, dropped connections, battery swapping, and start up time (as the wireless device pops out of standby), and just get yourself a good ole usb extension cable and repeater. This goes double or triple if you intend to play any games at all on the TV. For just clicking on an mkv file, a wireless device will do you. But it will do you poorly.