Could MacDive have broken my Gekko?

[miraclemax]

Hey Nick,

I'm just giving a heads up that I encountered a serious problem with MacDive and my Gekko. I'm not sure if MacDive was the problem or if I did something wrong myself or if the comp just crapped out but I wanted to give a description of what happened, just in case it might help others.

I'm going to have to have my Gekko serviced. It has stopped recording dives and is only keeping the last dive in memory.

2 weeks ago I went on small day trip doing 2 dives. I came back home, plugged my Gekko in and tried to download to MacDive. When I asked MacDive to download the dives, it first said that there were no new dives. Then after I tried on a different USB port, it said it again. Back to the first USB port it said it again. I then tried "Download Last Dive" and that downloaded one dive (not the 2 I had done that day, of course, just the last one). I then tried to download all dives again... no new dives. I then went into the Gekko's history and logbook and both only had the second dive of the day (even stating that it was repetitive dive number 2).

The contacts might have still been a bit wet when I plugged it into the Mac. That might have been it. Of course, when I email Suunto they are telling me that my warranty is void and that downloading dives from a Gekko is never supported and that they do not want to give help because of that.

I don't know what my dive shop will say, but I'll post here once I know more.

Thanks!

Edit: I did 2 dives last Saturday and the Gekko is still not keeping memory of all dives. Its only showing details of the very last dive I did. I think I should have it reset by my dive shop.

[nick]

Do you have low battery? Low battery can cause weird issues.

Otherwise, MacDive doesn't write anything to the device, it only reads (the same way Suunto Dive Manager does). There's every possibility that there is some kind of issue on the device itself, but it is extremely unlikely (if not impossible) that MacDive itself caused any issue there.

The other possibility is that you have a really small sample rate and did a dive that filled the memory.

[miraclemax]

Yeah thats what I figure. I'm not blaming the program, but I'm not a developer so I don't know what goes on in the data transfers.

Battery meter is showing full still (after 64 dives over 2 years).

The sample rate is fixed on a Gekko: 30 seconds (as far as I know it can't be changed, even by a dive shop).

ok dude, thanks for the help, I'm going to have it serviced.

[nick]

Suunto recommend you change the battery every 200 dives or two years (at least on my D9). Maybe it's a crappy battery meter - depending on the battery, this can be true. My original D9 battery came up with a low battery warning after a couple years. When it was replaced, the shop cheaped out. It lasted less than a year and just died. I took it out of my bag when I arrived overseas to do some diving, and it was dead - no warning.

Are gekko's able to have the battery changed easily? You could try that first. After two years I'm not sure I'd trust a full battery indicator

[miraclemax]

Noted. I'll email my dive shop and try that too. Can't hurt!

Thanks Nick!

[nick]

NP, sorry I can't give you anything more concrete. An uncommon issue for sure, but I wouldn't rule out something being hinky. Getting the battery changed and a service is never a bad idea, though.

Also - maybe you could try running the vyper test for me and I can look at the data? Under general, see "reporting download problems". Follow the instructions and just replace everything vyper2 with vyper. I'll have a peek at the data outside of MacDive itself and see exactly what is there, and if anything looks odd.

[miraclemax]

Hi Nick,

I've run the test and I'll mail you the VYPER.LOG file. There was no VYPER.DMP generated. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the test application ended in these 2 lines:

Code: Select all

../../source/src/suunto_vyper.c:256: Failed to receive the answer.
../../source/examples/suunto_vyper_test.c:82: Cannot read memory.

As a happy update, I tried to re-download all dives on the computer yesterday (using the new "Any dives that have not been imported" option that you added) and I got all my missing dives to transfer! So they are being saved to memory, but they seem to not be accessible by the Gekko itself.

I'm thinking I'll replace the battery, see what that does and if the problem remains, I'll bring it to my DiveShop and have it completely reset to factory settings.

Let me know if you find anything in the code, I really appreciate it!

Thanks!
Max

[nick]

Ok.. everything looks alright, as far as I can tell. Doing a full simulated download from the data you sent me, I get 81 dives.

Maybe you had an error after the first dive downloaded. Then, it's always going to find that first dive and say "no new dives found!" because that's how MacDive worked before. With the 2.1.0 updated, as you've found, you can say "any dives that have not been downloaded" and it will take longer, but it will scan back over the whole device and download anything that is missing.

"Only new dives" will stop as soon as it finds something it has already found. So that's what you'd generally use, since it is faster. The other options are basically to be able to recover from error, if necessary.

"Download Last" just downloads with the last settings you used - so a shortcut to save you using the download window, unless you specifically need to change the model or the timezone.

But, all that said, I don't see anything wrong with your device. Bad connection, dirty cable, wet contacts.. random problem I guess.