Patches to add basic support for the Suunto EON Steel

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 10:39 AM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> When discussing this with Jef he usually is not in favor of adding all
> these speacial things so I'm thinking of doing the parsing in Subsurface
> instead. You should implement a SAMPLE_VENDOR_EONSTEEL and pass the raw
> sample data back to subsurface...

I'd much rather just these things as some "string event" back, and
*not* make them special to the EON steel.

For the EON Steel, the battery data is literally strings:

 "Charge: 98%, Voltage: 4.157V"
 ..
 "Charge: 49%, Voltage: 3.802V"

and I'd argue that even if you have a dive computer that natively uses
milli-volts and returns it as an integer internally, returning it in
that form to any application would be prettyu much by definition
broken and useless. The application cannot *do* anything with such
data, since it doesn't really have meaning for the application - the
best we can ever really do in subsurface is to just display it as a
string, and let the human in front of the computer then decide that it
means. Without exact information about how precise the voltage is,
what the battery type is, etc etc, it's simply impossible to make any
sane automated judgement, but a human can at least try to figure out
the pattern.

The charge percentage is arguably the more important field for a
human, but other dive computers may just give voltage. This is stuff
that strings are good for.

So I think we might want to introduce an event type that literally
gives two strings: a description and a value. And then subsurface can
show that in an information window or something (maybe similarly to
how we show the dive computer name - hover over the name, and get the
dive computer "random data" fields.

This would allow returning things like "Conservatism" and "Dive mode"
too. Again, these things don't have any meaning *across* dive
computers, and not all dive computers necessarily even agree about the
meaning, so there is no sense in some kind of organized model for the
data, but it can be interesting for a human who knows the dive
computer to see.

                  Linus