GUE for one. Whether it takes "a few hundred" dives or a few dozen, GUE makes sure their divers can handle themselves in the basic doubles configuration before the diver is allowed to begin tech training. They don't let a diver near a deco bottle, a cave, etc., until the diver has all the basics, er, fundamentals, on autopilot, including things like checking the SPG. Just one school of thought, I know.
Check the SPG on autopilot? Or it's so automatic that it is ZERO task load, as some people seem to think theirs is?
I can see someone being able to maintain good buoyancy, etc, while checking their SPG. Heck, I can do it, no problem - if I don't have a bunch of other things going on at the same time.
But, for the argument that it's just as safe as glancing at your wrist to hold water (so to speak), unclipping, reclipping, etc. (potentially while also removing a can light head, reaching between your body and deco bottles, etc.) would have to be practiced a LOT before it could be done with no task load at all. Which means either people have to spend a LONG time diving a tech rig before they start tech training.... OR we recognize that they are going to graduate from tech training with a skill that still requires practice to be truly automatic, and in the meantime those people would actually be safer (as in, less task loaded) if they could accomplish the same task by simply glancing at their wrist.
Hi Stuart, in clarification of your (and others') comment/question, the Sol does not "need" to have cylinder size or capacity entered. The Sol offers two AI functions. The first is a pressure readout--just like an SPG, no more, no less.
The second AI function is a predictive gas consumption algorithm, which calculates the time until you will reach a user-set reserve pressure. This is based on change in cylinder pressure over time. Thus, it does not "need" the size of the cylinder. It also takes into account workload during the dive. A larger cylinder and/or less work will decrease in pressure more slowly, a smaller cylinder and/or more work more quickly, and this will be translated into the time remaining based on rate of consumption.
The Sol has a refinement, in which it predicts your gas usage during ascent and all stops scheduled by the computer, based on consumption during the dive, but adjusted for decreased consumption as you get shallower. It will, therefore, make a calculation of the pressure at which you should begin your ascent from depth, so as to arrive at the surface, after all stops, with your pre-set reserve. This is shown as "remaining air time" or "remaining bottom time", and is not "out of gas" or even "at your reserve" but "ascend now and reach the surface with your reserve intact." It also is not related to NDL, which is calculated and shown separately.
This calculation is shown separately from cylinder pressure, so you always have that key data on display so as to make any manual adjustments to your dive plan that you wish, if you decide not to follow the computer's prediction.
In use, on rec dives, I have found the predictive algorithm very accurate at suggesting when to begin the ascent under a variety of workloads, getting me up with or very close to the programmed reserve. However, it is the diver's cholce to follow it or not.
In other words, the Sol works exactly like my Atom and a lot of other AI computers. There is nothing unique to the Sol in what you described.
And it does not at all meet the criteria that I described earlier regarding maturation of AI in dive computers.
What I was talking about earlier was that, if you could enter into your dive computer the cylinder sizes (and starting pressures, for tanks with no AI transmitter), the computer could calculate your complete deco dive taking into account the amount of gas you are carrying. Very similar to what we do now with programs like MultiDeco or V-Planner.
As it is, the computer doesn't know the actual amount of gas in any cylinder. It calculates your ATR by monitoring your tank pressure and extrapolating how quickly it's going down to determine when it will drop to your reserve pressure. But, even if it knows you are also carrying a bottle of 100% O2, it cannot predict how long that cylinder will last until and unless you have an AI transmitter on it and you start breathing on it.
But, if you could program in each cylinder size (either, total surface air volume or water volume and working pressure), then it would "know" that your O2 bottle is, for example, an AL40 and if it knew that you are currently consuming 0.6 RMV from your back gas, it could estimate how long your O2 will last when you switch to it. It could then warn you if you, for example, have enough back gas but don't have enough deco gas for the quickest possible ascent plan. Or, of course, it could warn you if you just don't have enough gas, period.
Or it could accommodate having, say, not the optimal amount of O2, but having more than enough 50%, so it could just keep you on 50% longer, then switch you to 100% when you have been in deco long enough to finish with the amount of O2 you are carrying. You could do this on your own by simply switching to O2 as soon as you hit 20', breathing it dry, then switching back to 50%. But, with the computer being smarter, it would be able to "know" that you were going to do that and show you a "correct" TTS from the get-go instead of being wrong until you switch back to your 50% for your final deco time and the computer recalculates.
Now I already know that if any experienced tech diver bothers to comment on this they are going to say it's a bunch of hooey and nobody would ever want to dive that way and it's a waste of time and money and waste of bandwidth even talking about it.
And that's fine. I didn't say it's going to happen or people are going to want to do this. I just said that that level of "smarts" from the dive computer would represent the maturation of Air Integration - a significant move forward strictly in terms of dive computer capability and probably the furthest it could be taken. At least, until such time as biometric tech advances the current infrared heart rate monitor technology (speaking VERY loosely here) forward to the point that we have wearable biotech that accurately measure microbubbles in the bloodstream. Cheap, wearable heart rate monitors and blood O2 level sensors were total science fiction not that long ago. They exist today. I can't see cheap wearable, accurate enough for scuba diving, tech for measuring approach to DCS being really that far off.
Actually, I predict that in 10 to maybe 15 years, plain old open water recreational diving will be normal to be done with rebreathers and will include tech that monitors your blood stream and detects/prevents onset of DCS ("prevents" presuming the diver listens to their computer). People diving OC will be looked at as seriously old school by the new, up-and-coming divers who are training on rebreathers in their initial OW class. And, of course, computers will be EXPECTED to know everything about your available gas(es) and be able to tell the diver everything about their current dive, deco or not, including how long they can plan to stay down based on the amount of gas they're carrying.
Rebreather training will be standardized, so one course will let you use any rebreather (meaning any of the ones in this new class of recreational rebreathers that I'm talking about). Prices will have gotten low enough that it will probably cost a little more to buy a rebreather than a full OC kit - but probably cheaper than if you were also buying 2 - 4 steel scuba cylinders along with the rest of your OC kit. So, like now, a lot of OW vacation divers will just rent them.
But I digress...
