Efficient way to take your dive plans from the PC to the water

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BSV

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Messages
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Location
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
# of dives
500 - 999
Hello Tech Divers,

I was wondering whether anyone would have some easy and efficient way to take their computer generated Dive-Plans & Bailouts, from the PC to the diving slate in order to execute the dive.

I just found very tedious the task of hand-writing my dive plan for decompression dives from the PC to the dive stale. Consider that if you use three gas mixes, you should make a standard plan, then a half-time plan, a plan loosing one deco gas, and a plan loosing the other deco gas. This makes a minimum of 4 plans to write down, and obviously we must do that again for the backup slates.

Is there any way to directly print from he Z-Planner, V-Planner or any other Deco Software, to a some sort of water-proof paper, or acetate slides that could be attached to the diving slates.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks;

Juan
 
You could always print it out on waterproof paper and tape it to your dive slate. Waterproof printer paper is available here:

Adventure Paper | The Web's Best Selection of Waterproof Papers

Quick note: Do this a few times with your hand-written deco-tables as a backup to ensure that the tape sticks and the ink doesn't run while underwater or you could be out a deco table at the wrong time.
 
I've always found storing them in my brain to be fairly convenient.
 
Just print them on normal paper and use packing tape to cover them and stick them to your slate. It is not perfect, but it will last longer than your dive will. Not to mention how cheap it is.
 
Just make sure you use a laser printer not an inkjet.
Laser printouts don't run if they get damp - inkjet does...
 
V-Planner for the plan, including securities and some remarks, hand-writing.
Trimix computer (OSTC MKII) for the real
 
I print and laminate tables for a range of depths and times.

For instance, I have a set of tables for 18/45 with average depths of 170,180,190,200, with runtimes between 20 and 100mins (planned as three deco gas dives, but its easy to lop off the deep deco gas if the time is real short). That covers a pretty wide range. For whatever dive I'm doing on a given day, I just put the appropriate table in the front of the clear pocket of my wetnotes. 4 tables = 2 pieces of laminated paper (170&180 on one, 190&200 on the other). For short bottom times or dives I'm very familiar with, I might use ratio deco.

I have a few for these for different gases, depths, and durations, but the bottom time range is always very broad to allow for contingencies.
 
Just print them on normal paper and use packing tape to cover them and stick them to your slate. It is not perfect, but it will last longer than your dive will. Not to mention how cheap it is.

That's certainly the cheapest and most straight-forward option. I used to print them to size to fit upon a wrist-slate, then cover them with wide cellotape. Primary plan on the first flip-up, just deeper, just longer and just deeper & longer on the following flip-ups.

If I didn't have access to a printer, then I'd just cover my wrist slates with white duct tape and write the plans on with a sharpie pen.

If you own a laminator, you can make up some more long-lasting tables (useful if diving the same sites repetitively).

What I do now is simple... sharpie pen into my wetnotes.
 
A plain-paper laser print-out from V-Planner slipped into the clear pocket on wet-notes actually works - it'll last through the dive. Don't try to take it out under water, though! For a little more durability, DIY laminating with clear tape does the job: I've got a bunch of the profiles I dive most often stuck in my wet notes, and they last pretty well. (Thanks to Dsix36 for that idea!).
 
This was one of the things that bothered me a LOT during my technical training. Part of it was probably that I was so new to it, but I wanted a very simple way to go from V-Planner to a nice, well laid out plan with important pieces of information highlighted (gas switches, shooting of the bag, etc). We started out by just writing out the easier plans by hand on our slates and as the dives became more complicated we started printing out the bare bones information and then highlighting gas switches in one color, gas switches in another, and then laminating it with packing tape as others have said.

Being a computer programmer I REALLY disliked doing all of this by hand. Computers are (supposed to be) really good at doing these types of repetitive tasks. I have partially implemented a web interface that you can just drag & drop (or upload the files from disk) the text from V-Planner into and it will ask you for a name (Primary, Too Long, Too Deep, Lost xxx Gas, etc) and do the color coding for you. You can tell it the criteria for when you want to shoot the bag (absolute depth or 'first stop of at least X minutes') and the size of your slates and it will format the plan appropriately (splitting into multiple columns when the dive plan becomes too long). Worked well for our dives up to 300' with 3-4 deco gases.

There are some issues with the sizing for the dive slates - something is goofy in the CSS (or browser support for the CSS). I haven't gotten a chance to do much technical diving lately, so haven't found the time to chase down the bug. If it is something folks would want to play with let me know and I can clean it up a bit and push it up onto a publicly accessible website.

All of this assumes you have a printer available to you, which wouldn't work well on a live-aboard but was great down in St. Croix.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/
http://cavediveflorida.com/Rum_House.htm

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