Motorola embedding Bluetooth in printers and copiers

Lets see if the demos work

By John Leyden, 10th April 2001

Motorola has announced a strategy for working with OEMs to embed Bluetooth wireless networking technology into devices such as desktop printers, copiers and medical imaging equipment.

The idea is to build Bluetooth technology natively into a device rather than adding it via a plug-in module containing a transceiver chip. This would potentially provide advantages including fewer components, tighter integration and a lower overall cost for devices featuring the short range radio networking technology.

Motorola will collaborate with OEMs throughout the year and anticipates the first Bluetooth wireless technology platforms to be available early in 2002.

According to Motorola, its embedded Bluetooth solution will give equipment manufacturers a wider choice of computing platforms onto which they can outfit wireless networking capabilities.

Motorola Computer Group will enable its embedded Bluetooth technology to run on three operating systems Linux, VxWorks, and Microsoft's Windows 2000 and on two types of processor, PowerPC and Intel.

Motorola will be exhibiting an embedded single-board computer enabled with Bluetooth wireless technology at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco between April 10 to 12.

Demonstrations of Bluetooth technology went notably awry at the CeBIT exhibition in Hangover last month, and it'll be interesting to see if this slightly different approach works any better.

A number of firms in the industry have successfully demonstrated Bluetooth and the problems that cropped up at CeBIT were largely due to a lack of standardised software code for Bluetooth, which remains an issue. ®