Bluetooth Dive Computer Yet?

[griffon]

What you want them to give up selling you a hundred dollar USB cable witch may or maynot be slightly modified to force you to buy from them? Crazy talk .

I was hopping the rebuild on the suunto D6i would include BT... maybe the remake of the D9 will. It is odd, but I think only if you compare it to faster eco tech systems (phone etc). Dive innovation in comp tech is heavily limited cost of market entry and market size. You can only get so many engineers, with the right skills, based on what you can ear vs pay them.

Most of the companies are still selling only slightly updated versions of the same comps they had out 10 year back.
I do find it sad that they will go down a expensive rabbit hole like the integrated masks but miss low hanging fruit like adding bt across their lines, arguable a better market stand out point IMO.

 

[RonR]

...Dive innovation in comp tech is heavily limited cost of market entry and market size. ...

Very true.
We considered BT when developing the (Atomic) Cobalt, but at the time a minority of personal computers were BT enabled, it is pretty power hungry for data transfer, and it would have been expensive to implement for a tiny volume product like a dive computer. Updating firmware could get interesting- you might still need to have another means of connecting if you wanted to be able to update the program.

Because of the small market, most dive computers have a long development cycle. In fact, most don't have real USB yet, but are using serial communications and adapters (part of the reason they have expensive cable kits). We elected to use USB because of its universality and the robust simplicity of the interface, and just made it so it would work with standard cables that are available anywhere. A side benefit is that some of the USB contacts can double as water sensors, something we need to have anyway.