Profile of one of the dives I did in the Maldives, displayed using Subsurface

As a diver one logs all his/her dives into a paper logbook. In the paper logbook one generally notes things like the gear used, the volume of air consumed, the buddies you dove with, the diving/weather conditions, special things/animals that were encountered, a description of the dive (or a map), etc.

A photo of my paper logbook

Next to the paper logbook, modern dive computers (which divers use to keep an eye on their depth, remaining bottom time, etc.) also keep digital logs of each dive onto the dive computer itself. Over the weekend I decided to check out Subsurface, a piece of open source software for reading out scuba dives from your dive computer (created by Linus Torvalds, of all people). So I connected my Suunto Vyper to my Mac using the provided USB cable and … nothing – even though the docs state that Subsurface should automatically detect your dive computer.

Checking out System Information.app my Suunto Vyper was indeed connected, yet Subsurface would not recognize it.

“Suunto Sports Instrument”

Long story short: eventually I found a Google Groups Thread suggesting to download Virtual COM Port Drivers. One installation and a reboot later that indeed did the trick: my Suunto appeared as a mount point in Subsurface.

A mounted Vyper, yay!

In hindsight I found a note somewhere way down in the documentation about requiring drivers (“Appendix A – 17.1. Make sure that the OS has the required drivers installed”); this in contrast with earlier (and bigger) mentions in other parts of the docs of “it just works” lacking any mentions of drivers.

Subsurface →