Post
by rah » December 11th, 2006, 11:53 am
The Precis:
I had a problem with the PM4 again this morning, which may or may not have been to a kernel panic on my Mac when I was using the USB Logger function in Apple's USB Probe to see what I could see. :-), details below if you want 'em. When I actually sat down to actually row this morning, I got all kinds of cruft, like not seeing the HR in the workout monitor (after selecting the Suunto belt, manually even, and seeing a beat-count in the when I did), not seeing any battery *charge* when I checked the battery, *not* seeing the PM4 on the USB section of the Apple System Profiler, much less the Log Card Utility, and, ultimately, having the workout screen freeze after about three or four pulls, though not the PM4 itself. This was rectified by pulling out the battery, and sticking it back in, apparently resetting the monitor.
The Novel:
The adventure continues. First, a modest confession. The reason I was in Georgia last week was to attend Aaron Hillegass' Big Nerd Ranch Objective-C/Cocoa Bootcamp. :-). I did this technically for fun, since the last time I wrote actual code (not Excel macros, or Applescripts, or whatever) was a Pascal class in college in 1984 or so, and my ostensible reason was an attempt to resuscitate the fortunes of an idea I've been working on since the beginning of the dot-com bubble, with, um, varying degrees of success. :-).
So, I came back home, and, after the adventure with the automatic upgrade and accidental reset I talked about on Saturday, was rooting around on the British site's workout generator for weightloss. For fun I dumped the, heh, considerable, output of that into an Excel spreadsheet, and spent about an hour fooling around munging it into usable shape. *Then* I had the bright idea of using what I had ostensibly learned the week before, now fading fast, with the pseudo-word "CoreData" coming to mind, to try to actually *retain* the firehose I had barely managed to survive and plink around with the PM4 at the same time.
Whereupon, after getting tired of fooling around with XCode, and reading the PM3 interface doc, while discovering that the SDK was Windows Only :-), I thought I'd actually see what the heck my PM4 was *saying* on the USB wire, and fired up USB probe to take a look. Then I made an apparent mistake of causing a kernel panic by installing the USP Probe's logging kernel extension after it asked me to :-), and, after rebooting my Mac, and the above falderal (see "Precis", above), I managed to get things working again. (The PM4. The Mac still panics when I try to log USB, so I'm going to talk to Apple, since I have to use my *one* annual el-cheapo-ADC-Select-membership support call before December 20th anyway :-)).
So. I'll let you guys know how it goes, actual rowing-wise. It might be me, it might be the PM4, but it's what happened, anyway. Code-wise, we'll see if I can get anything to work, but methinks I'll *start* by scraping the weight-loss workout calculator output and munging it into shape, and maybe combining it with the Log Card Reader's .csv file, something I'm actually familiar with in other venues, before I go poking the PM4 with a stick down the USB cable anymore. :-).
PM4 Users Please Note: 
and slowly draining. In addition, there is a bug 
in the firmware which does not properly charge the battery even when plugged into USB or an AC Adapter 
