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Showing 1 of 26 reviews about:
Handheld Scientific BT-500 Bluetooth Adapter
eeriedescent
16
Jun 22, 2019
checkVerified Buyer
If it works for you, count yourself lucky.
I got this because they specifically advertise on their website that it works with the Model 01 from keyboard.io. It does not. There are no circumstances under which it does. I installed the keyboard firmware they used for testing and tried it myself. It does not work.
There are many ways this does not work. It does not work with HID report protocol, which won't send keycodes over a byte boundary, because they're only using an 8 byte buffer as if it's HID boot protocol. If you try to use HID boot protocol on your keyboard, it sends garbled keys, because it's interpreting them as a bit mask (like report protocol) instead of key codes.
It works with very, very few of my other keyboards. Given the above, I'm amazed it works with any of them. How does it work? Glad you asked: instead of actually processing USB descriptors like they're supposed to, they instead hard code behavior based on the keyboard you've plugged in (presumably with a boot protocol default if it can't figure it out).
You also can't upgrade the firmware in case they ever fix these issues.
This is a broken product, shoddily made, and poorly supported. Good thing it's cheap, or I'd be pretty mad.
There's basically no other product that does this over Bluetooth LE (there is the USB2BT+ that you can find on tindie, but it's much more expensive and Bluetooth Classic).
I ended up learning Arduino, how to solder, and buying a couple microcontrollers to build one myself that actually works.
Recommends this product? No
handheldsci
153
Jul 10, 2019
eeriedescentHello @eeriedescent,
Thank you for purchasing our product and giving the review. First of all, if you are not 100% satisfied with the Adapter, you can request full refund including s&h. No questions asked and no time limit. Secondly, the BT-500 we sent out in the last drop does work with Model-01 from keyboard.io, at least with the one we purchased. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e-p36ixa94. However, the model-01 has gone through multiple firmware releases, and the BT-500 has problems with some versions. We tried to fix this but was put in back burner a while back.
The adapter has very limited memory and speed. It is not able to parse full HID report descriptors, which can be very complex, like a full-fledged operating system. So from time to time we have to do some kludge based on a specific keyboard uniquely identified by USB vendor and product IDs. Unfortunately some of the keyboards, especially those based on QMK including the one keyboard.io, change firmware but use the same IDs so the Adapter can't distinguish different versions. Due to the same resource constraint, the Adapter handles boot protocol better than report protocol (but it does attempt to parse the descriptor). Currently we are confident to say it works with 95% of the keyboards/mice in the market. What other keyboards did you test that didn't work? We would like to know every case of comparability. If you give us the models of the non-working keyboards, for EACH of those that we can verify (and not already listed on our web site), if we can get the adapter to work with it (this is in most cases), we will send you a free adapter. How does that sound?
Indeed the firmware is not upgradable by end users. It is certainly technical possible but would add substantial support cost to this low-price product. Nevertheless we do provide free firmware upgrade service, including round-trip shipping if you are in the States.
Again, we appreciate your feedback. Obviously nobody likes low rating but every feedback pushes us to make the product better. In this particular case we now know the odd-shaped Keyboard.io Model 01 does have some fans. We better make the Adapter to work with it. Consider this a commitment.
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