Suunto Stinger PC connect problem

[Crispin]

I can't seem to get my Stinger to transfer my dives to my PC at all of late....

I click transfer, then wait about ten seconds, then put the stinger in the interface on TR - PC.....

The stinger says ACW, then I click transfer


It times out every time......

Trying to get hold of someone at Suunto is like trying to catch a conger with your bare hands!

I work in IT so I feel pretty stupid really, but I cant get this to work for love nor money, I have done all the "normal" stuff like reconnecting cables e.t.c ....


any ideas / experiences......

 

[akivioja]

Hi,

Try this:

1. Put your stinger to transfer mode.
2. Connect your stinger to the cable.
3. Start suunto dive manager program.
4. Start transfer from the program.

It's important to connect your stinger before you start the program (if I remember it right).

-Antti-

 

[Stephan Whelan]

Crispin,

Did you ever find out the problem?

 

[Crispin]

No, the Suunto guys got back to me, and I followed their instructions, but no joy - might do a deinstall reinstall tonight......will let you know what happens...

 

[jvoets]

I've been messing around with the PC interface too when I just got my stinger.

First mistake: putting it wrongly in the plastic holder. That is the black cover of the depth gauge of the watch against the 3 contacts of the holder. Should be the water sensor against those 3 contacts

Every now and then I get a time out. I then just fiddle the watch around a little bit with in the holder. I think the problem is that one of those contacts is not properly connecting to the water sensor. You might want to give it a try. Usually I hear some kind of clicking when I do this.

I always use this order:
0) start up Suunto Dive manager
1) set watch into TR-PC mode
2) insert into holder
3) start transfer mode in Dive Manager software

hope this helps

 

[Crispin]

Thanks for that, i'll give it a go......

 

[jvoets]

I've had another problem with the Dive Manager software.
Almost drove me crazy.

When you have a scuba dive in the memory of your watch, transfer it and delete part of the dive profile (I did this when I lost my watch on the bottom of a lake, didn't want those last 10 minutes seperated from its rightful owner to count towards my bottom time) then you will get a problem with 'calculating dive series' when you want to transfer a dive next time.

Apparantly the software gets confused about the difference between the dive profile in the watch and the PC and it starts inserting the edited dive again.

The 1.2.something version of Dive Manager ended up in a loop, displaying the message about calculating the dive series over and over. Only thing I could do was killing the sdm program, move the backup logbook (jaap.sd~) to my logbook file (jaap.sdl) and try again. That's where I almost got crazy.

Upgrading to 1.3 helped a bit, this one only inserts the edited dive in my logbook, although it is already in there.

For all you stinger-owner-wannabe's don't get scared by reading this post, I really love the watch, think it's a great tool, for free- and scuba diving.

 

[Crispin]

I agree, I just think that these are the quirks of such a high tech piece of equipment......I love my stinger - honest

 

[thomssi]

Hi, dunno if this will help, but I also had problems with my stinger PC connection. It turned out it was because I had microsoft active-sync running and it was due to active-sync not letting you get access via the COM port. Might be a red herring but may be worth a look.

Cheers

Simon

 

[Hennie]

Hi Cripsin,

your test from SDM to the PC-interface i presume was successfull.

 

[efattah]

Don't bother

Don't even bother trying to use the Stinger interface. It's better to manually review the depth vs. time profile for each dive, and enter the data manually into MS Excel anyway. Same data, but now it's in a program which you can really control.


Eric Fattah
BC, Canada

 

[Crispin]

i'm actually trying to write my own interface to the stinger at the moment, and it (hopefully) will do this sort of thing eric, then I can do all sorts of things with it....

i'll let you know how I get on...

 

[jvoets]

Sounds interesting. I like the Suunto Dive Manager a lot, but some things are missing or could be done better.
One thing I find a major omission is the lack of statistical reports.
I'd like to have statistical distributions of nr of dives per depth, per dive-time, per month etc...

Did some experiments with exporting all the dives from my logbook to CSV and then import them into MS Access. A good interface to the sdl file format would be much better. Some Perl code and voila you'll have your divelog on the web without a problem.

Do you happen to have any descriptions of the sdl format?

 

[Crispin]

no i dont - not yet, i'm going to work out how to change it into an xml document, so it can be exported and shared by freedivers everywhere, so we can build up a central web repository of all our dives - hopefully it'll be worth (not in commercial terms) something to researchers and stuff.....but most importantly you'll be able to play with the data v.easily, and draw up your own stats.......

i'm going to try and work some ftp functionality into the s/w so watch this space for more info i guess.....

 

[Stephan Whelan]

Crispin,

Sounds like an excellent plan.

However, i'd suggest that the software use the HTTP port of 80 to communicate with a central server as a lot of firewalls block FTP ports due to security implications.

The server can then use a PHP or CGI Perl script to handle parsing the XML document into a database. A frontend to display generic results could then be written.

I'll gladly help coding the server side stuff when you get to that point.

 

[Crispin]

Thanks Stephan, I think i'll use SOAP over HTTP like you said....ftp can be (i'm sure you know) a nightmare....

i'll mail you with the details of what i'm trying to do and you can see what you think.....

 

[jvoets]

Nice job Jeff!
These kinds of reports I did not think of. I've added them to my wishlist.

Maybe we should talk to the guys behind the internet dive log (http://www.immersions.com/idl/) they have support for the Suunto Stinger, Spyder etc... Hopefully they will share the file format of Suunto Dive Manager.

 

[jvoets]

Any progress on the home-grown interface to Suunto watches?
I'm still very interested in statistical kind of reports on my dives, the kind that jeff shows on his website for example

 

[Stephan Whelan]

Interesting site i've just seen by Suunto:

http://www.suuntosports.com

Looks like an online repository of user uploaded info.

 

[jvoets]

Very nice site!
I'm curious if they will have additionial functionality on the website. The stuff I so desperately want in the SDM software