irda on mac

[Jef Driesen]

On 2013-06-05 15:08, Massimiliano Gargani wrote:
> I own some Uwatec computer and I use mac, very bad couple.
> I have a IRDA USB dongle that works fine if I use JTrak but I cannot
> use any other divelog program under Mac because when I connect the
> irda dongle no /dev is created so I cannot set the device to use for
> download in SubSurface.

That's normal. IrDA communication uses sockets, and a device node isn't 
necessary at all. But that's the least of your problem.

> The dongle is base on Sigmatel STIR42xx. Sigmatel exists no more and I
> have a very old version of the driver I think is 32bit only and OS X
> 10.8 is 64bit only.
> 
> I tried also on OS X 10.6 and 10.7 with no luck.
> 
> Anybody knows if there is a way to use Mac+SubSurface to download
> dives from Uwatec computer?

Unfortunately Mac OS X does not have a built-in IrDA stack (unlike 
Windows and Linux). Therefore, all dive computers using IrDA are not 
supported on Mac OS X. This is unlikely to change in the future.

The only way to support IrDA on the Mac is to talk directly to infrared 
chipset and implement the IrDA protocol on top of that. This is far from 
trivial (IrDA is fairly complex) and would only work for that specific 
chipset. This is simply out of scope for the libdivecomputer project 
(which is the library used by subsurface for downloading dive 
computers).

You might be interested in Dive Log Manager, which has done the above 
and supports the Uwatec on Mac OS X, provided you have a dongle with the 
"right" IrDA chipset:

http://moremobilesoftware.com/Dive_Log_Manager.html

An alternative is to download your Uwatec dive computer from inside a 
Windows or Linux virtual machine, and then copy the data back to your 
Mac host.

Jef