Aladdin Prime DC

[moehlsen]

I currently have an Aladdin Prime Dive Computer(Scubapro-Uwatec). Is it compatible with your software?

[TnT]

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The problem is that the Aladin Prime (which is an Uwatec Smart/Galileo compatible device) uses infrared for the communication, and Mac OS X doesn't support that out of the box. We know it must be technically possible to communicate over infrared because JTrak supports it. I suspect they somehow manage to communicate directly to the infrared hardware (because that would explain why only certain infrared chips are supported), but unfortunately none of us knows how to do that. On Windows and Linux the situation is very different because the OS provides the necessary infrared support, and on those problems we do support downloading from Uwatecs. Thus the missing link is the low-level communication with the infrared chip, not with the dive computer itself.

[moehlsen]

Thanks for the info. There is an USB IR device that UWATEC sells. They say it is MAC compatible and also sell a Dive Log program of their own. If I have the USB IR device would MacDive work? Also, the newer Mac's all have Pentium based processors and can run windows. I believe that Mac switched to Linux base coding for the newest OS. If I had to, I suppose I could run MacDive in Windows.

[TnT]

The USB IR adapter that Uwatec sells (and probably many others as well) is indeed recognized by Mac OS X, because it's just another USB device. But the data communication uses the IrDA protocol and unlike Windows and Linux, Mac OS X does not support that. What Jtrak on Mac OS X, does is implement the entire IrDA protocol in the application, and talk directly to the USB hardware. In theory we could do the same, but the problem is that I don't know how to communicate with the usb hardware directly. On Windows and Linux this is not necessary because the OS takes care of that.

Mac OS X is based on BSD, not Linux. And because Mac OS X runs on intel cpus, that does not mean you can run Mac applications such as MacDive on Windows. That would have been nice

[clochette90]

TnT >

I have a MBP with iRda "onboard", and using it with apple remote.... so, i can likely say that MBP and OSX are able to inteface IrDa devices.

I have a poor knowledge of this technology, but i think that if i can use my remote, it could be possible to talk to Galileo via IrDa "standard" protocol ? no ?

[nick]

As far as I am aware, these receivers are *receive only*. IE you cannot use them to transmit and therefore communicate with other devices. They are simply there to accept the remote control signal.

[TnT]

You are confusing the difference between "infrared" and "IrDA". The first only means the signals are transmitted using infrared light, while IrDa is a standardized communication protocol over infrared signals. So it's perfectly possible to have a device that sends signals using infrared light (e.g. a remote control) without using the IrDA protocol.