A wireless solution for your average MIDI studio ..

[Jay Vaughan]

> If I remember well, they've been around for years with madcrazy prices…


Well, I'm finding it very rewarding to be receiving ANT messages on Android phones with ease.  Low-power is all about installed base, and there is actually a rather large 'front' of ANT-capable hardware out there in the making.  Its a sensible technology, by the way .. bluetooth has its rewards, its of course out there too, but at the device-level, current bluetooth is a bit .. hefty.  ANT allows very small sensors to communicate cheaply to larger ones, bluetooth requires a 'bit more of a device' on the device side.

By 'cheaply', I don't mean dollar cost, I just mean bandwidth/voltage/resource usage in the design.  Apropos the ANT consortium holding its gains, I think they - like others - are falling victim to the lie that things like bluetooth and wlan and ANT and so on, need to be on 'different kinds of radio'.  SOC design has rendered this a parody.  All that "ANT+" have left in the ring are the real working designs of the protocol (i.e. no hardware lock-in) ..  Vendors are now rolling out cheap radio chips that will talk to all wireless spectra and power levels - ANT, bluetooth, wifi - from a single package.  There's already ANT in many brand featurephones, sorta just waiting to be turned on.  Sony on Android is leading the way (XPeria has full-spectra hardware); current Apple hardware can do it; its not turned on.

Imagine a tiny fleet of cheap solar-powered squads of info-gathering components, spunking out 8 bytes of data into the universe for years at a time, happily chirping among thousands of others within very well-bound lockstep of each other, a curious chorus of sensor-gathering output devices, singing a song punctuated occasionally by larger faster spurts of 512-byte packets or more .. its gonna get messy.


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Jay Vaughan