First release of Subsurface with i330R and DSX support

Finally after some work, I finnaly have a working version of Subsurface which could download the dives both from the Aqualung i330R and Apex DSX.

You can get them on the github page

So, now that it is done, I think I could down the reason I end up forking Subsurface.

The reason

The problem with the i330R and the DSX is that they require the user to enter a PIN for the bluetooth pairing, which many developers of Subsurface seen as a way to lock in the user in the wallet garden provided byt the vendor.

The thruth is that this way of pairing systems is way more older and predate even the widespread diffusion of Internet, let alone this enshittification of the products. As an example my first GPS navigato (a Compaq 1440 handheld from the early 2000s) use this method to pair itself with the GPS receiver.

Now, I cannot disagree that this way the vendor tried to force people to use its horrible phone app, also given the fact that the i330R has a USB cable but cannot connect to a PC, but I consider the pairing mechanism just a little unsual.

Add to this the the i330R (and possibly the DSX) are two pretty decent entry level dive computer, are loaded with features and come at a pretty cheap price. It it obvious that these dive computer are pretty popular with the new divers.

BTW, if we want to talk about problems with the i330R here a big one: you cannot update the firmware if you have not phone with bluetooth 5.x. Any lower version will end in you getting the notification that a new firmware is available but no update will be possible.

And what is the final reason for me: while the vendor offer a paid subscription to their cloud where to download the dives (you have only 10 free upload to the cloud with their app), there is a problem: once the subscription expire, they don't alert you about it, they just let it expire and delete all the dives in excess of free 10s.

After some discussion on the support group of Subsurface, it was made clear that the developers would not make any effort to support these dive computer and also made clear that even a working patch would not be accepted.

The actual solution

Since both of these dive computers are already supported by the libdivecomputer library, which is the one used by Subsurface to talk with them, the only possible solution was to fork the project and add the support for them.

So I forked the repository and integrated the work done by Jef, the library author, to show that it is trivial to add the support them.

After some failed try, I finally have a working release for Mac and Linux (as AppImage) of Subsurface that is able to download even from the i300R and the DSX.

Future plans

The plans are to keep supporting these fork as long as possible hoping that maybe in the future it could be merged back in the official rerpository.

I will update it every now and then to keep up (especially if some critical bug or security problem will emerge) and I will try to add some unique feature (like saving the PIN code to avoid to enter it every time)