Copyright (c) 2011-2014 Asymworks, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The Benthos Dive Computer library is a collection of libraries and applications to interface to scuba diving computer devices. Similar to libdivecomputer, benthos-dc provides a device-agnostic interface, but benthos-dc is organized as a set of plugins so that support for new devices may be seamlessly added after the library and any client programs are installed.

Currently benthos-dc supports ScubaPro/Uwatec Smart devices, either through a local IrDA connection, or over a network using an IrDA connection at a remote computer. A plugin which wraps libdivecomputer is also provided.

The Benthos Dive Computer Library is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License, version 2.1 Individual Plugins are licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License

Benthos supports both Linux and OS X platforms, and Windows support is planned. Because recent versions of OS X do not include support for IrDA, plugins which use IrDA are not supported on OS X.

Benthos currently includes the following plugins:

Benthos uses the CMake build system. The recommended method to compile and install Benthos is to use an out-of-source build. Starting in the main source directory, run

mkdir build-release
cd build-release
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
make && sudo make install

Benthos includes the following compilation options that determine what is compiled. They are specified in typical CMake option format

-D<OPTION>=[ON|OFF]

Benthos includes a small console application which transfers data from a dive computer using the benthos-dc library and saves the result in the Universal Dive Data Format. It is typically run as

benthos-xfr -d smart

The -d smart option specifies which driver to use (in this case, smart). IrDA drivers do not need a device path specified; for drivers which cannot automatically determine where the device is located, the device path must be specified.

benthos-xfr -d smarti smarti-server.local

Benthos uses "tokens" to determine which dives to transfer from a device; namely all dives which follow the token. The benthos-xfr application stores the token from the most recently downloaded dive so that the next time it is run, only new dives are transferred. This behavior can be overridden on the command line to either manually specify a token (-t [TOKEN]) or to prevent storing the new token (-U).

By default benthos-xfr transfers all data including all time/depth/temperature points recorded by the device. To transfer only dive header information, pass -h to benthos-xfr.

Options may be passed to change the driver behavior. Driver options are colon-delimited name-value lists of the form

key1=val1:key2=val2:key3:val3

The manual page for benthos-xfr lists which options may be passed to drivers and the effect they will have.

Benthos was originally conceived to communicate with a Uwatec Aladin Tec 2G dive computer over an IrDA interface; however, when the author changed from Linux to OS X it was no longer possible to use IrDA natively. Instead of constantly running through a virtual machine, Benthos now includes a small server application which runs on a Linux machine and enables dive computer communication over the network.

The Smart-I daemon is designed to be built and installed on a small system such as a Raspberry Pi running the standard Linux IrDA stack. The setup using a Raspberry Pi, running Raspbian with 3.12.22 kernel and an MCS7780 IrDA dongle has been tested and confirmed to work.

Important Note: IrDA support was dropped from the Linux kernel in 4.17 so the latest distributions supported by Smart-I on a Raspberry Pi are Alpine 3.8 and Raspbian Stretch.

The Smart-I daemon includes a System V init file so it may be started as any normal daemon:

service smartid start

The default service port for Smart-I is 6740 but it can be overridden either at compile time in the CMakeLists.txt file or at runtime on the command line.