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We did a LOT of testing with WIFI a couple of years ago. I don't know about wireless USB but I can say for sure that WIFI in a stage environment is awful. Really really unreliable. The Alpha was originally intended to be a wireless instrument but we couldn't find a single wireless protocol that was high enough throughput and reliable at the same time. Even with a wire we spent over a year making our wire protocol work well - its now a 40mbit, transformer balanced, error recovering protocol, which is why you can have a stage wire up to 40M long on an Alpha. Stage environments are really really noisy electrically. We have dreams of a wireless Alpha still, but they now involve a years work for a team of engineers, 2 RF chaps and 2 software guys. It will be difficult.

With regards to playing the Pico wireless, you may find it possible in electrically quieter environments but remember that it is also powered (and it draws more than 400mA on and off, depending on how many LEDS are lit). We do intend an adapter to our stage wire so that it can be played with an Alpha basestation on a long wire at some point next year, Phil (our Head of Electronic Engineering) has been looking into this. It's quite a complicated thing to make though as it has to be a USB host, which turns out to be quite fiddly.

We'll keep you posted as to progress...

John

The Pico actually ships all its raw key data via the USB (several mbits) and the DSP to make sense of this is done on the host computer, so data rates are still high.

John