Author: Alastair Scott
Date: 07:16:39 09/27/03
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On September 27, 2003 at 08:29:38, Steven Edwards wrote: >What is really needed here is a decent digital chess clock that also has a >general data interface. And it's time to get rid of all the wires and use >Bluetooth, a radio data standard that is ideal for this type of application. I >already have a mock up of this using my Palm Tungsten T (acting as the clock) >communicating with a pair af computers via its built in Bluetooth. Each >computer has a D-Link Bluetooth module plugged ito a USB port and all involved >chat with each other at 700+ Kbps within a five meter radius. > >Perhaps the current digital clock makers could incorporate Bluetooth in future >clocks. And DGT along with any other maker of electronic chessboards could >install Bluetooth on the board itself for an even more integrated product. I have tried similar things with IR and PalmOS; I would guess that the volumes of chess-related products are so small that the R&D to include Bluetooth can't be justified ... especially given that there are licence fees and all manner of Chinese walls to climb over: http://www.radioregs.co.uk/bluetoot.htm (Don't know about the USA, but certainly in the UK there is enormous and, I suggest, quite excessive nervousness about radio interference; rollout of DSL was fought until the Radiocommunications Agency, a truly hideous regulatory organisation which seems to be against everything by default, was sidelined). But amen to the sentiment; quite apart from the wiredness, why are digital things generally so _ugly?_ None of the digital chess clocks I know look good and there is a similar problem with barometers and thermometers for one; the Oregon Scientific ones do everything imaginable but are, in aesthetic terms, brutal lumps of plastic. Alastair
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