I was thinking of buying an external disk tray to mount the drive in while copying data off the internal drive and but then read the reviews at Maximum CPU and MacInTouch for the Newer Technology Voyager Q hard drive dock and deviced to go that route. I brought mine from MacSales/Other World Computing. At around $95 it is more expensive than a simple external tray, but it is also much more useful in jockying disk drives between systems. I connected it to my MacBook Pro over Firewire 800 and it worked great, including booting off the Firewire 800 to test the disk worked fine.

A small Phillips screwdriver and Torx T6 driver was all else I needed. I found the video below that shows how to do the physical drive replacement. I’ve had my MacBook Pro apart before so no mystery there but this is a great video.

The whole backup of the 200 GB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner took about two and a half hours over Firewire 800 to the Voyager Q. Physically swapping the disk took about 15 minutes. Piece of cake.

Oh I really hope they are screwed.

At least the SD card slot does support most popular SD size media as Apple clarifies here.

The MacBooks Pros have too little I/O connectivity. Yes I know Firewire 800 is great, but I thought these were Macs for professionals, not PC laptops. Now the 13″ and 15″ models have a single FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot and that is it. And yes I know you just can’t count ports to measure really usable I/O performance but the sheer physical connectivity alone of the older MacBook Pros was very useful.  FireWire 800 is great but many high-end users need e-SATA based RAID connected via an ExpressCard e-SATA adapter or for various other wireless connectivity or other uses. The 17″ MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and is a great laptop but it is also a bit too big for many users. Adding an SD card slot and keeping the ExpressCard/34 slot would have been great – or they could have even bundled an SD card reader if they needed the marketing claim for SD card support.

I live and die based on my one year old 2.5GHz 17″ MacBook Pro with 3 x USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and an ExpressCard/32 slot. A great laptop. And it usually has a SanDisk Multi Card Reader  in the ExpressCard/34 slot. That reads more types of media (if anybody cares about Sony MemoryStick Pro)  than the SD card slot built into the new MacBook Pros and much more importantly when I remove it I have an ExpressCard slot for other uses.

I am curious if Apple implemented a really fast SD card slot or if it works via USB 2.0 (like the SanDisk ExpressCard/34 adapter I use). Still that would not make up for losing an ExpressCard/33 slot.

Oh well with the matte screen only available as an option on the MacBook Pro 17″ many photography and video professionals and serious amateurs will see that as the only portable computer from Apple they can use. I thought at some time a matte screen for the 15″ MacBook Pro would appear.  I take that as more consumer apathy or ignorance about color and color management than Apple making bad decisions.

Anyhow  I pasted Schemp-Hirth’s artists renderings for the Arcus and Duo Discus XL over each other and you can see the large version PDF if you click on the image above.  This of course depends on the accuracy of the artist renderings Schemp-Hirth uses in marketing materials.

The shit storm that Sun is about to be dealt from stockholders and their lawyers is going to be interesting to watch.

IBM is clearly best positioned to leverage Sun’s technology and customer base. Sun’s got some things worth having, but many of those things also turn into boat anchors quickly. For me the highlights include Solaris, ZFS, MySQL, core Java, and one or two discrete products, but not much more. Sure you get access to additional customers but competitors like HP will also be pretty aggressive about going after those customers.

While Solaris is a dying franchise, I expect it still has lots of life left, so an acquirer has to work out how to leverage that ongoing business and how long to keep that platform alive while migrating the user base to Linux. IBM or HP have to do the same with AIX and HP/UX and other operating systems so maybe that’s not so hard for them to do.

In an IBM acquisition MySQL would join DB/2 and Informix and other databases in IBM’s portfolio. It would be a harder acquisition for HP or other acquirers. If anybody can leverage MySQL and try to pull together different open source MySQL related development projects its IBM. And I especially expect IBM Global Services to be able to capture MySQL related revenue better than Sun services ever could.

ZFS is impressive as file systems go, but Sun does not obtain revenue from users of the open source code base, and is more and more effectively forced to give away ZFS software for free. The Linux open source community will pick off more and more ZFS capabilities over time. ZFS is also not well intergraded with MySQL, and while doing so could offer some interesting capabilities, doing so this would be a distraction for the MySQL team who have enough problems shipping their base product into a maturing but still fast growing market of diverse needs and expectations.

Companies like BEA with WebLogic, IBM with WebSphere and the Eclipse IDE, and even Oracle (who now owns BEA) have extracted serious value and strategic mindshare from Sun’s Java franchise.  Sun has seen some revenue amongst all this expense. But examples like Java Mobile, are under threat by Apple and their iPhone (why should Apple help commoditize applications on their platform?). And I certainly do not believe any “give Java away for free and customers will buy the hardware” dreaming. I’d hope an IBM or similar acquirer would be pragmatic about cherry picking what parts of Java to keep in-house and open sourcing the rest. I suspect IBM is pretty much there already with a business model around WebSphere, they could float off most of the Java stuff and work to make it succeed in a more open development environment. Making Java successful as a community developed technology is an important anti-Microsoft .Net strategy required for the ongoing WebSphere etc. business.

The thing that sticks out with Sun Microsystems is the litany of failed and mismanaged acquisitions over many years. Somebody must have done a business school study on this. At times it is almost as if after Sun does an acquisition different internal groups all get to gave their own shots at destroying the acquisition, especially if the aquired company was perceived to compte with some existing Sun product or futureware.  I mean how can a company screw up so many acquisitions? It can’t be by accident can it?

So here are some Sun acquisitions that I have looked at more closely than others, or just know people who went through the acquisition.

NetDynamics — Sun acquired NetDynamics and early Java app server company . Even if the software needed major re-architecting Sun should have leveraged the early NetDynamics momentum. They seemed to just let it drop. And by way of disclosure one of my sillier career decisions was turning down Zack Rinat on joining Spider Technologies, that became NetDynamics.

Cobalt Networks — Sun obviously overpaid for Cobalt but then the political anti-bodies inside Sun took over and shut down Cobalt’s highly successful but relatively low end reseller channel. Forcing them through Sun’s reseller program, which casued many smaller Cobalt resellers to drop out and killed much of the Cobalt revenue.

Terraspring – Another company acquired as a part of the Sun N1 systems management “strategy”, except it was hard to see much strategy, or tactics for that matter. And Sun ends up with a product they are giving away. I looked at Terraspring while at VMware, not seriously, more to understand the lay of the provisioning and management landscape. I was underwhelmed. Terraspring appeared to have little technology or traction and was going to get steam-rolled by new generation virtualization enabled approaches. And I never understood Sun doing so many acquisitions with potentially overlapping management technology including Cobalt, CenterRun, Terraspring, etc.

CenterRun –  It seemed one month the word on the street was that the investors wanted to shake up CenterRun’s product strategy and then a month or so later they managed to pull off selling it to Sun. I’ve got to hand it to Sequoia Capital on pulling that one off.

Afara Websystems — Durign this aquisition Sun locked in some core staff but treated most of the staff like they were definitely not wanted at Sun. McNeally pissed many of them off in a “Welcome to Sun” address that  apparently went very badly, with people literally calling recruiters straight after McNeally’s presentation. Some of the Afara folks went on to contribute to the SPARC products but the acquisition was badly handled.

MySQL — At $1B for MySQL, Sun overpaid greatly, including $800M in that hard to come by cash stuff, and that should have been obvious. The MySQL team seems pulled in different directions and maybe they are struggling within the Sun culture. The departure of Monty Widenius must have been a blow internally; it certainly was a public black eye. The evolving mixture of third party storage engines and other open source MySQL related projects, while a fascinating example of open source development, raises concerns that Sun’s leadership of the MySQL market is going to get fairly nebulous. Sun needs a strategy to try to pull this together if they want to continue to grow their ability to make money out of MySQL. Otherwise these other projects, and people around them are going to cherry pick interesting sweet spots of the market.  Like Drizzle related activates for Web infrastructure. See some discussion on that ecosystem recently in Jeremy Zawodny’s The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter! (except it does matter if you are Sun trying to make money on that $1B MySQL aquisition).

Some acquisitions, notably Kealia worked much better, maybe because of the cachet of Andy Bechtolsheim and his ability to drive a product to market from within Sun, even if it did take longer to get those systems to maket than initially seemed to be claimed (and those boxes were pretty darn nice servers).

—

Sun you shoudl have sold to IBM,  but hang in there a few more years and Rackspace might acquire you, and can mount your logo on their mantel piece right next to that SGI logo.

I repeated this talk with slightly updated slides, at a Bay Area Soaring Associates (BASA) meeting on March 26th. Here are the PDF slides from the BASA talk

The talk does not set out to try to explain badges in whole, or be a cookbook for doing badge flights — instead I try to explain things that pilots seem to have trouble with such as observation zones, 1% rule, IGC flight recorders etc. This was prompted by the utter frustration I see people having either trying to understand the rules or having badge applications rejected.

Thanks to Judy Ruprecht the SSA badge and records administrator for some great advice and clarifications on things.

Here is a set of web handy web links

There are three “must read” FAI Badge documents -

• FAI Sporting Code Section 3 — Gliding
• FAI Sporting Code Annex C — Official Observer & Pilot Guide
• The IGC approval document for your particular flight recorder at the IGC GNSS Flight Recorder portal

Reading the approval document for your flight recorder is important as different flight recorders may have different requirements, for example whether they need to be sealed to the glider, whether the official observer needs to enter a security code etc.

Other resources are

• Soaring Society of America (SSA)  “Soaring Achievement” > “Badge Info” for forms, FAQ and other information
• IGC GNSS Flight Recorder portal for technical specifications, file formats, download and verification software and approval documents
• Just Soar  provides National Flight Database (NFD) derived airspace information for the United States. The default USA airspace data that come with SeeYou, Winpilot and other products are woefully out of date. The Just Soar data is what the SSA uses to check for airspace compliance on badge and record flights – it makes sense to use exactly the same data in your PDA, flight computer and in SeeYou for flight planning and post-flight analysis. Just Soar has also recently added TFR data.
• US Naval Observatory for Sunset times

Popular IGC approved flight recorder manufactures

• Cambridge Aero for Model 302, 302A and information on older Model 10, 20, 25
• EW Avionics for microRecorder and older Model D
• Garrecht Avionics for Volkslogger
• LX Navigation  for Colibri and LX series
• NK Soaring for ClearNav (IGC approval in process) and repair of older Cambridge flight recorder

Flight recorder calibration services popular with local soaring pilots

• Cambridge Aero for Model 302 and 302A
• Carl Herold, CH Engineering, Reno and Ely Nevada, cell phone (775) 230-0527 calibrates many types
• Craggy Aero calibrates many types
• NK Soaring for Cambridge Model 10,  20, 25 and the ClearNav once it is IGC approved

Popular soaring software

• Naviter for SeeYou, SeeYou Mobile and ConnectMe
• Glide Navigator II
• Winpilot
• XCSoar

Since I was playing earlier SeeYou Mobile simulator and also with the new SeeYou Mobile release candidate running on a real iPAQ 310 I decided to make an iPAQ 310 skin for the simulator.  The simulator is currently the older SeeYou Mobile 3.0 release and not the version designed for PNAs, Naviter confirmed they will be updating the simulator to pick up all those UI changes later, for now it is quite usable however and the large 800×480 screen works  very nicely.

The skin is based on  a photograph of my iPAQ 310 with some Photoshop cleanup work. There are up, down and enter buttons added on the top right hand edge that do the same as the iPAQ scroll wheel, and the power button will turn the simulator off.

I was hoping that the SeeYou Simulator might support transparency/alpha to allow a nice rounded shape but (after wasting time trying) I checked with Naviter who confirmed it does not.

Here is the Bigscreen_310.zip bundle, it installs the same as in my previous post.

After suggesting to other pilots on the ASH-26E owners forum that the Naviter SeeYou Mobile Simulator is not that useful I actually started to play with it more than I had done before and I have changed my opinion, it is pretty nice to play with and handy for testing out stuff. I’ve also hacked the simulator to run in a custom skin with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, shown in the screen shot above (click on the image to see it full size). Below I’ll provide the files to do this.

[Note: I've updated this with a skin with the additional iPAQ PDA buttons for Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask. However  I am still having problems understanding the simulator behavior with these buttons. See notes below.]

While Naviter call it a simulator it is not a low level emulator/simulator. It is not emulating PDA hardware or the Windows Mobile operating system. Instead the simulator is a port to Windows of the SeeYou Mobile applications that normally runs on Windows Mobile (and soon Windows CE). I’m not sure what tools were used to help do this but it is impressive that Naviter have already done this.

By default the simulator has 230 x 320 pixel QVGA vertical PDA format like many current high-end  PDAs. However on a modern computer display this looks awfully small. Also my interest in SeeYou Mobile moving forward is really on the HP iPAQ 310 and similar Personal Navigation Assistants (PNAs) and those tend to be 800 x 480 pixel displays. I also wanted to create a large display on my computer so I could play with connecting this to the Silent Wings soaring simulator.

So I looked more closely at the simulator and realized it is easy to change this. The simulator configuration is controlled by the devWin.ini file, usually installed in \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim. This file has offsets for the SeeYou Mobile window within a .BMP bitmap file skin as well as specifications for the location of the simulated PDA buttons on the skin bitmap.

I created a new bitmap skin in Adobe Illustrator and tweaked the devWin.ini file to accommodate that skin. Apologies for the ugly beveled edges, but I’ll make them look better in future.

I know that PNAs like the iPAQ 310 do not have the standard iPAQ buttons but I still wanted them. I could get the left, right, up, down, enter, and power buttons appear to work perfectly. I have included the Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask buttons and they will work with a default behavior, however it appears that if you make any changes in Settings>Commands in the simulator then the Calendar, Contacts, Mail and iTask buttons stop working. The other buttons keep working. To get back the default function of these buttons power off the simulator, delete all the  XML tags in the BigScreen.XML file between <COMMAMND> and </COMMAND> (but leave the COMMAND tags, I dod not check what happens if you delete them), and restart the simulator. It could be that I’m misunderstanding something and I am hoping Naviter can point out what I’m doing wrong.

As with the default simulator the keys on the PC keyboard are also mapped to the buttons so the left, right, up and down PC cursor keys will do the same as clicking on the icons.

If you want to do this yourself here is all you need -

1. Install the SeeYou Mobile Simulator on your PC and test that it works, start the simulator by double clicking on the icon installed on your desktop or by double clicking on  DevWin.exe usually installed in \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim
2. Download bigscreen.zip. The bundle contains just three file.
   1. Copy the simulator skin file Frame.bmp from the zip package to the SeeYouMobile Simulator directory, normally \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim
   2. Move aside the current devWin.ini file by renaming it to anything else. Then copy the devWin.ini file from the zip package you downloaded to the SeeYouMobile Simulator directory, normally \Program Files\Naviter\mSeeYouSim
   3.  To make things easier to get started use my BigScreen.xml configuration file which has been set up for his higher screen resolution, download this and place in the user which will normally be in your My Documents\mSeeYou folder. When you start the simulator you will see a pop-up dialog box  asking which configuration file to use. Select BigScreen. If you have installed custom maps and airspace files you will need to modify the Settings to point to the right files once the simulator is running.
3. Start up the SeeYou Mobile simulator. If launching the simulator from withing the installation directory, you launch the DevWin.exe icon not the mSeeYou.exe icon. Alternately you can use the links the installer may have installed on your desktop.
4. In SeeYou Mobile in the simulator go to Settings>Files and make sure all the files point to the correct location. This would normally be files in the users My Documents\mSeeYou folder.
5. You should see a simulator window like the screenshot above, if you don’t let me know.

One claim I have seen is that the emulator could be used to run SeeYou Mobile on Windows XP or Vista based devices like the OQO 2+. The OQO 2+ has a 5″ diagonal 800 x 480 pixel display, optionally using OLED technology.  But the OQO 2+ is expensive, currently around $3,000 for the OLED version with accessories (while a HP iPAQ 310 can be found for a few hundred dollars). While it would be interesting to play with this the emulator on a Windows XP device like the OQO 2+ but the simulator appears to have too many UI bugs to be usable in actual flight. Some of the small problems I’ve seen are mentioned in the Naviter Dicussion Forum.

And all my playing is really done on my MacBook Pro, running Windows XP SP2 under VMware Fusion.

I had one iPAQ running Windows Mobile 2003 (with the as supplied version 1.0 ROM and firmware) and another running Windows Mobile 5.0. Selecting COM5 (the Bluetooth serial port)  as the input port for SeeYou Mobile will cause SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to hang until I started Silent Wings and it made a Bluetooth connection. On Windows Mobile 5.0 SeeYou Mobile does not hang, it just shows the “NODATA” status message in the top left of the screen. Once Silent Wings connects SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 would start running OK. The problem was if I did not have the Mac with you to start Silent Wings then  you could not get in and even change the serial port settings before SeeYou Mobile would lock up.

I don’t know if other  Windows Mobile 2003 PDAs have similar problems. To see if a PDA has his problem just turn on Bluetooth on the PDA, don’t do anything else and don’t have the PDA connected to an active Bluetooth Serial connection. Then go into SeeYou Mobile and set it to use the Bluetooth COM port (COM5 for the iPAQ hx4700, this may be different on other PDAs). If SeeYou Mobile hangs it has the problem,  if it reports “NODATA” after a short while and the user interface is still responding to to menu events etc. then the PDA does not have the problem.

Besides SeeYou Mobile and Silent Wings, I suspect this bug affects all sorts of Bluetooth serial connections on the iPAQ 4700. Anyhow upgrading the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to ROM version 1.1 and firmware update 1.1 appears to fix this problem. Software updates are available on HP’s web site.  The updates I used are available here -

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 ROM update for Windows 2003  (install this first)

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 Firmware update for Windows Mobile 2003  (we will see how long these link works)

I  certainly recommend doing these upgrades and staying with Windows Mobile 2003, and not upgrading to Windows Mobile 5.0., which is a performance dog.

BTW be sure to use a real Windows PC to flash the ROM to the iPAQ, I normally run Window XP under VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro, every time I have tried to run an iPAQ  ROM upgrade from within a VMware Fusion virual machine it will brick the iPAQ, leaving it stuck in the USB ROM loader. I’ve reported this to VMware.

It’s winter, but I’m flying out of Truckee in the Sierra Nevada mountains on an amazing day, it seems like the middle of summer. I self-launched from Truckee Airport in my new Antares 20E. I’m now around 16,000′ just South West of Truckee airport heading towards Mount Rose. I have the amazing vista of Lake Tahoe off to my right. I decide to head across the Carson valley to the Pine Nut mountains, and reach over to my PDA and change my destination waypoint to Mineral Peak, …. slap. Oh no, it’s all just a simulation.

So here is the setup. The Silent Wings soaring simulator is running on a MacBook Pro and driving a iPAQ hx4700 PDA running SeeYou Mobile. The NMEA (GPS) data to drive  SeeYou Mobile is coming from the (simulated) Cambridge 302 in the (unfortunately just simulated) Antares 20E glider I’m flying. The NMEA data is traveling over a Bluetooth serial link between the MacBook Pro and iPAQ PDA. Once set up properly all I need to do is just start Silent Wings on the Mac and SeeYou Mobile on the PDA and they just talk to each other. SeeYou Mobile works like normal, and you can even record an IGC flight trace on the PDA. But getting to this point can be a little involved. I tried  describing this to people and then realized I really need to write it down in painful detail. So sorry for the length, but here goes…

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to play with the Silent Wings soaring simulator for a while. Silent Wings gets my interest as it runs on a Mac (and also runs on Windows and Linux). I also fly X-Plane, which is an impressive flight simulator but lacks real cross country soaring capability and has very few sailplane models available. One trigger to doing this now is that I want to play with a HP iPAQ 310 Travel Companion running SeeYou Mobile soaring software and as well as flying with it in real-life I can use the simulated NMEA GPS output from Silent Wings to play with this.  However before playing with the iPAQ 310 I wanted to test this idea out with my existing iPAQ hx4700 PDAs. I have a hx4700 running Windows Mobile 2003 that the hx4700 originally shipped with another updated with Windows Mobile 5.0 (which is a performance pig on the hx4700, and not an upgrade I would recommend). Bluetooth setup procedures for Windows Mobile 2003 and 5.0 are identical. Windows Mobile 6.0 may be similar, I don’t have a Windows Mobile 6 device to test with.

Note: If you have an iPAQ hx4700 runnign Windows Mobile 2003 make sure it’s ROM and firmware are at least version 1.10, or you may have problems with SeeYou Mobil hanging. See notes on this here.

Silent Wings can output a  simulated NMEA data stream (which partially simulates that from a Cambridge 302) over a serial port. If the Macintosh had a real physical serial (RS-232) port then it would be s simple matter of connecting a PDA to that port and starting Silent Wings on the Mac and SeeYou Mobile on the PDA. Unfortunately most Macintosh (and most PCs nowadays) don’t have physical serial ports and since both my MacBook Pro and the iPAQ 4700 have built-in Bluetooth (with serial port profiles) lets just use that to do the connection. Unfortunately the cumbersomeness of both the Mac OS X and Windows Mobile and the Bluetooth administration utilities conspire to make what could be a simple task a bit painful.

Of course if you don’t have Bluetooth on your Mac (or Windows PC) you could use a USB to serial adapter on the Mac or PC to the serial port on the PDA. But looking forward to the iPAQ 310 where Bluetooth is the only option, that’s what I wanted to set-up.

Credit to Tod Kurt for a nice blog with Bluetooth configuration instructions that helped  inspired me to document this clearly.  The following was tested  on a Mac PowerBook Pro 17” running Leopard 10.5.5 and also 10.5.6 and Silent Wings 1.09.12. This was tested against HP iPAQ 4700 PDAs running Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0.

Caveat: I think Silent Wings is fantastic and what I have on my Macintosh is very usable to play with SeeYou Mobile. However what I’m describing here is probably for failry technical users. I have found a few problems with the Silent Wings NMEA serial port implementation and am working with the Silent Wings developers on getting fixes for these. As is this is quite usable, however for  if you do things like turn off the PDA during a simulated flight you will find problems with Silent Wings hanging or leaving unkillable (zombie)  process on the Macintosh. I’ll provide updates as these issues get fixed.

Overview of the Setup

The configuration main steps we will go through are -

1. Turn on Bluetooth on the iPAQ PDA
2. Setup Bluetooth on the Macintosh and pair the PDA and the Macintosh
3. Configure the Bluetooth serial port in Silent Wings
4. Configure SeeYou Mobile to use the Bluetooth Serial Port

Each of these steps are described in detail below.

Turn on Bluetooth on the iPAQ PDA

We’ll assume that Bluetooth on the iPAQ was previously turned off and is not paired with the Mac, etc. If not you should still be able to  follow along with these steps. These steps are the same for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5.0 on the iPAQ hx4700.

Do the following on the PDA.

	Step 1A. Go to the Connections panel under Settings and tap the Bluetooth icon (not Bluetooth Manager) to launch the Bluetooth Settings utility.
	Step 1B. In the Bluetooth Settings utility Bluetooth will be OFF by default. We will make out changes to the the Default profile, so leave that as is. Tap on the Turn on button.
	Step 1C. Once Bluetooth has powered on the Bluetooth Settings panel will look like this. The blue LED on the top front of the hx4700 will also be on. The LED may have been on before if WiFi networking was turned on. All this LED is telling us is that WiFi or Bluetooth network hardware is powered up, it does not give any indication of Bluetooth traffic, if other devices are paired to the PDA or in range etc. Once the Bluetooth has powered up as shown, tap on the Accessibility tab.
	Step 1D. In the Accessibility panel, check the options are as shown here, these should be the default settings. It is important that the Accessibility is set to All devices to allow us to set up a new pairing. Do not select Paired devices only, as confusingly this will prevent being able to establish a new pairing. When done tap on the Services tab.
	Step 1E. In the Services panel, tap on Serial Port in the scroll list in the upper part of the panel. Make sure that Enable service is checked. Uncheck Authorization required to avoid being prompted for authorization each time you start Silent Wings. This is really important as if SeeYou is already running sometimes the authorization request won’t pop-up on the on the  PDA screen properly (it will be hidden under the SeeYou Mobile window). It’s easier to make sure that authorization is never asked for. Next tap the Advanced… button.
	Step 1F. In the Advanced panel note the Inbound COM Port is COM5. The inbound port on the PDA will be connected to the Macintosh when it calls into the PDA. So later we will configure SeeYou Mobile to connect to COM5. Tap OK to close this Advanced window. Tap OK to close the Bluetooth Settings manager. Tap the (X) button to close the Settings folder. We will continue the setup on the Macintosh and come back to the PDA later to compete Bluetooth pairing with the Mac and to configure SeeYou Mobile. Leave the PDA turned on so the Macintosh can discover it in the following setup.

Setup Bluetooth on the Macintosh and pair the PDA and the Macintosh

Now that PDA has Bluetooth is powered on we need to configure Bluetooth on the Macintosh.  Current  Macintosh computers have built-in Bluetooth. Older Macintosh computers can use a third party USB to Bluetooth adapter. The steps to configure systems with most third party USB Bluetooth adapters should be the same as  the instructions here.

Do the following on the Macintosh.

Step 2A. Launch the Systems Preferences utility and click on the Bluetooth icon.

Step 2B. In the Bluetooth panel click on either the Set Up New Device… button or the + button to launch the Bluetooth Setup Assistant. If existing Bluetooth devices have been configured in this panel then the Set up New Device… button won’t be present, just click on the + button in the lower left frame and follow the next steps.

Step 2C. Click the Continue button.

Step 2D. Do not accept the default Device Type there, instead select the Any device option. Click the Continue button.

Step 2E. The Bluetooth Setup Assistant will search for Bluetooth devices. Here the Macintosh has discovered an iPAQ hx4700 with the default system name Pocket_PC. The name of your PDA may be different and other Bluetooth devices may appear here. If there are multiple Bluetooth devices, you may need to select the correct device in the list. Click the Continue button.

Step 2F. Click the Passkey Options… button. Select the Automatically generate a passkey option. This will cause the Macintosh to generate a passkey to pair with the PDA later in the setup. Click the OK button. Click the Continue button to go to the next page in the Setup Assistant.

Step 2F.5. We’ll Apple that’s a pretty useless page to bother showing a user (this whole Bluetooth Assistant looks like it was written by a summer intern, who maybe slept through the classes on software usability). Just click Continue.

Step 2G. The Bluetooth Setup Assistant generates a passkey to enter on the PDA. The passkey generated will be different than the one shown here. Look at the PDA, a dialogue box should pop up asking for this passkey.

Do the following on the PDA.

Step 2H. The PDA should automatically pop-up a Bluetooth Authentication dialog. Here Darryl MBP is the name of the Macintosh computer requesting the passkey, your computer name should appear instead. Enter the passkey generated by the Bluetooth Setup Assistant. Tap the return button on the soft-keyboard once you have entered the passkey. The Bluetooth Authentication dialog will disappear. Now return to the Macintosh to finish with the Bluetooth Setup Assistant. Note: if the passkey is not entered within about 30 seconds the request times out and you will see an error message in the Bluetooth Setup Assistant on the Macintosh. If this happens just click the Go Back button and then the Continue button to restart the passkey authentication request.

Do the following on the Macintosh.

Step 2I. Deselect the Use device as a headset for this computer option Click the Continue button.

Step 2J. The Bluetooth Setup Assistant should show this if things have worked so far. Click the Quit button.

Configure the Bluetooth serial port in Silent Wings

The Bluetooth Setup Assistant just created a serial port. We need to find out the UNIX device name of that port and configure Silent Wings to use it.

Do the following on the Macintosh.

Step 3A. The Bluetooth preferences panel should still be on the Mac desktop, if not start System Preferences and click on Bluetooth. If there are more than one Bluetooth device shown in the left hand panel click on the PDA we are configuring to select it. Click on the gear icon and select Edit Serial Ports… from the menu list.

Step 3B. In the pop-up panel describing serial connections to your PDA look for the serial device we just created. It will start with the name of your PDA, in this case Pocket_PC-BluetoothSeri-1. Take note of this name. In some circumstances if you may see additional serial ports called “PDA synch” or similar names. Don’t worry about them, just note the name of device similar to the example above. Click the Cancel button to close the serial port setting pop-up panel. Click the red window close button to exit the Bluetooth settings panel.

Now we will configure Silent Wing to use this serial port.

The Options>NMEA configuration panel in Silent Wings allows limited configuration of serial ports but its’ enough to get started.

Do the following on the Macintosh.

Step 3C. Start Silent Wings on the Macintosh. Click on the Options button in the main Silent Wings menu In the Options panel click on the NMEA icon. You should see the NMEA Options panels shown above. The first thing you will notice is the default Serial Port option is bogus COM3. A clear left over from the Silent Wings on Windows. Don’t worry, we’ll fix this next.

Step 3D. Click the Enable NMEA Output check box. Silent Wings does not currently show the correct serial port device options for Bluetooth serial ports in the Serial Port pull down list, but we can easily enter the correct serial port device name… Double click on COM3 in the Serial Port button (to select all the COM3 text). We are going to enter the name of the Bluetooth serial port we determined earlier. I’ll use the  /dev/cu or UNIX call out device. So we prepend “/dev/cu.” to the name of the serial device noted earlier. (I need to update comments on this, will do soon – DKR) Following the example from earlier we would enter /dev/cu.Pocket_PC-BluetoorhSeri-1 into the Serial Port field. Your device name may be different. Click the OK button to close the Options panel.

Step 3E. Now use Flight Planner or Resume Previous Flight to start a Silent Wings simulation on the Macintosh. You can leave the simulation paused while we finish the last step on the PDA.

Configure SeeYou Mobile to use the Bluetooth Serial Port

Step 3E. On the PDA run SeeYou Mobile and go to the Setting>Input panel and click on the Port Settings… button. In the Serial port dialog box change the Port to COM5, the Bluetooth Inbound COM port we notied earlier. Make sure the other settings are as shown here. Click the ok button to exit the Setial port dialog box. Click OK at the bottom of the screen to exit the Settings utility. SeeYou Mobile should be ready to receiving NMEA data from Silent Wings. Note: We are using the inbound port as Silent Wings is essentially dialing-in to this port to connect to SeeYou Mobile.

On the Macintosh unpause the Silent Wings simulator and you should see SeeYou Mobile receiving NMEA data. If so pat yourself on the back. If not, oops, see the trouble-shooting suggestions below.

Normal Use

Now that we’ve been though all this setup the good news is that using this is easy, with just one caveat.

THE PDA MUST BE TURNED ON BEFORE STARTING SILENT WINGS.

Otherwise Silent Wings won’t be able to open the Bluetooth serial port when the simulation starts up and while Silent Wings will run there will be no connection to the PDA.

Because of the way we set up things, with the devices paired and no authorization requirements the Bluetooth link should just start automatically – but that PDA has to be turned on!

You can start SeeYou Mobile before or after Silent Wings is running.

And again do, not power off the PDA while a Silent Wings simulation is running  doing so may hang Silent Wings and leave zombie processes requiring a reboot of the Macintosh. As mentioend before Silent Wings is looking at fixing  this.

Advanced Tips

It is also possible to manually edit the SilentWings options.dat file to configure the serial port. This also allows access to additional options baud rate and NMEA frequency.

1. Make sure that Silent Wings is not running
2. Use your favorite text editor to edit the options.dat configuration file (normally found at /Applications/SilentWings/data/options.dat).
3. Search for “NMEA” and you will find something like this -

#—————
# NMEA Settings
#—————
use_nmea                = true
nmea_port               = /dev/cu.Pocket_PC-BluetoothSeri-1
nmea_speed            = 4800
nmea_frequency     = 1

5. Save changes and close the text editor
6. Start Silent Wings.

options.dat NMEA parameters are -

• use_nmea is either true or false.
• nmea_port is just the serial port we’ve talked about before. Remember to use the call out or cu serial port device for reasons discussed here.
• nmea_speed is the serial port baud rate. I do not recomend increasing this.
• nmea_frequency is the rate that NMEA data is sent to the PDA. This is sometimes confused by people with the IGC flight trace logging rate. Usually PDAs receive NMEA data at a few to ten times per second or so, which is faster than the rate that data is saved to the  IGC flight trace file (typically once every 1 to 10 seconds). Setting  nmea_frequency to a few times per second may help improve things like wind calculation in SeeYou Mobile (but I have not verified this).

Troubleshooting Suggestions

If things are not working, check over all the above instructions carefully and make sure you followed them exactly.

Under the Silent Wings home directory (usually /Applications/SilentWings) look at the log file data/swings.log and search for “NMEA” and see if Silent Wings has failed trying to open the serial port.

Try deleting the Bluetooth device on the Mac (click on the minus-sign button on the Bluetooth Preferences panel) and starting again reconfiguring Bluetooth on the Macintosh.

On the PDA look under Settings>Connections and try playing with the Bluetooth Manager utility (not the Bluetooth utility described above ).

In the Bluetooth Manager Click on the Connections tab to see active Bluetooth connections to the PDA. If you don’t see a serial port connection listed under Incoming Connections something is wrong.

Play around in the Bluetooth Manager and you should be able to work out how to look at paired devices, press and hold on the icon for a paired devices and in the pop-up menu that appears try deleting the pairing and repeat all the above process again.

If things seem to be almost working, it may be worth trying to test the serial link by running terminal emulators on the Mac and PDA.  You should be able to see characters typed back and forth. Unfortunately there is no terminal emulator included with Windows Mobile. However there is a basic terminal emulator built into Naviter SeeYou Mobile. To access this go to Settings>Hardware and tap the Terminal… button.

A good commercial terminal emulator for Windows Mobile is DejaVu Software PocketTTY, which can do a lot more than just serial port connectivity. The five minute at a time free evaluation mode of PocketTTY may be enough for a quick debug, but the software is easily worth the ~$20 price.

To get a terminal emulator session on the Macintosh run Terminal.app and in the terminal window type -

screen -U /dev/cu.Pocket_PC-BluetoothSeri-1 4800

Where /dev/cu.Pocket_PC-BluetoothSeri-1 is the name of the device created earlier. If your PDA has a different name than the default Pocket_PC this device name will be different. Now launch your terminal emulator on the PDA and you should be able to see characters being typed back and forth, there is no local echo, so what is typed on one device will only appear on the other device.

If you are curious what things such as baud rates are actualy set on the Macintosh serial port you can use the  UNIX stty command. For example once the serial connection from the Mac to the PDA is established type the following in a terminal session-

stty -f /dev/cu.Pocket_PC-BluetoothSeri-1

Where, again this device name may be different for your particular Bluetooth serial device.  See man stty for more information.