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Another feature of the Eon PC interface: The PC program estimates your surface air consumption in standard cubic feet per minute (SCFM) or in standard liters per minute (SLM). A standard unit of gas is it volume at 0 degrees Celsius and 1 atmosphere. The Eon downloads beginning and ending tank pressures along with enough information about the profile to determine a weighted average depth for the dive. The PC program asks the user for the amount of air carried on the dive. It then determines the amount of air represented by the tank pressure drop downloaded from the Eon. Air consumption is calculated for the average depth, then adjusted to a depth of zero. Finally, the volume units are adjusted from the Eon's recorded water temperature to 0 C, giving air consumption in units of Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP). This allows the air consumption on dives in different water temperatures to be compared directly. The simulator portion of the PC program allows an input of SAC in standard units, and a tank size and fill pressure. It then allows the user to watch air consumption while simulating a profile. The pressure drops faster in deeper parts of the dive, just as observed when diving. This can be used to get a feel for required cylinder sizes on different multilevel profiles. Both the estimates of SAC and simulations of air consumption are subject to some error. The sources of error appear in the user manual for the PC program. Pretty neat, eh? Much work went into simplifying the method of moving dives from the Eon to the PC program relative to the method used in the original Solution PC program. The common complaint is that too much bookkeeping is required to put dives into the PC logbook. The problem is that the PC program needs to know which dives go together as a group in the log. The Eon knows only that dives in a repetitive series are related to one another. Once it offgasses and shuts off it has no way of recording the fact that another series of dives might be part of the same dive vacation. To allow the PC logbook to be more than a simple chronological list of dives the user must tell the program which dives go together on the same dive vacation. This is done by assigning a dive number to each dive. These are intelligent numbers whose values tell the program how each dive fits into the logbook as a whole. The program assigns numbers by default; the user needs simply to review and change them if necessary during the downloading process. It is not necessary to add any other information at that time. Not very complicated once you do it a couple of times. The ability of the program to sort and rearrange dives, and to perform operations on a whole dive vacation is well worth the effort of assigning dive numbers. The program can perform some operations on a dive with no bookkeeping and without the need to enter that dive into the logbook. Again, this was added to answer the complaints that the numbering system is a hassle. -- Bill Merrill, Marathon, Wisconsin, USA mgardens@ao*.co*
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