This is a generic bluetooth adapter, seems to work well. The low profile fit is very nice, it basically disappears into the USB port leaving just a tiny nub. There is an annoying bright blue blinking LED, but some electrical tape or black paint fixes that. Other than that it seems to work just fine. Range is great within a room but I haven't pushed to find it's max limits. I also don't use this for any bandwidth heavy application (file transfers, audio, etc). I'm far more concerned with latency, and it seems to do reasonably well in that respect (~20-50ms communication latency for mouse input).
The primary reason I picked this up was to look for something that was:
1) Linux compatible
2) used the Cambridge Silicon Radio chipset
I needed to be able to change the Bluetooth MAC address in Linux. I needed multiple adapters to utilize the same MAC address for an embedded application. This one will do the trick. It was detected as a CSR chipset device immediately and the NVRAM on the device can be reprogrammed so that a new MAC address change is permanent even after disconnects.
All told, it's an affordable and reliable little bluetooth adapter. It's identical from a functionality standpoint to the ones from
Azio
or
Sanoxy
, which I also purchased. The differences are in size and lighting. Grab whichever suits your taste, they're the same underlying hardware as far as I could tell. Of the three models, this is the one I ended up using despite the Sanoxy being many times cheaper just because I wanted the smallest form factor.
For reference:
Bluetooth MAC address changing is done via the bdaddr program that is part of the bluez stack.
This program isn't compiled in most linux distributions despite having the bluez package installed, so it has to be compiled from scratch. It's not difficult to do, just ensure the test suite is enabled with --enable-test in the ./configure when compiling bluez.
After that simply do (via sudo or as root):
bdaddr -i <dev> -t <MAC>
bdaddr -i <dev> -r
That will do a temporary (software only) MAC change, reset the device to make the new device active, but not write the supplied MAC address to the NVRAM of the device for testing purposes. If that performs satisfactorily, repeat the steps but remove the -t flag and the supplied MAC address will be flashed to NVRAM to make the new address permanent across device removal.
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