USB 3 interferes with wireless radio-controlled keyboards and mice

Tuesday, December 6th, 2016

I bought an Intel NUC Kit NUC5CPYH as a replacement for my Raspberry Pi 2b media center and file server. One of the main advantages of the NUC over the Raspberry is that it has USB v3 ports, which greatly increases the throughput speeds to the external USB disks and doesn’t require me to have external power on some of them.

I use a radio-controlled keyboard as my remote control my media center. When I plugged it into the NUC, I suddenly found the range of the keyboard greatly reduced. Even when I placed it in exactly the same place as the Raspberry Pi, the range was still horrible further than about 1.5 meters.

Turns out USB 3.x ports interfere with 2.4 GHz devices, which the radio-controlled wireless keyboard operates on.

The solution was to plug in a USB extension cord and putting the RC receiver in that and placing it about 30 cm from the NUC.

On a side-note: Disable UEFI boot if you can’t seem to install any Linux distro on your NUC.