AutoScan mystery solved. Fix available for floppy access.

[JP]

ACS has a bunch of juicy PDFs posted with their drivers, including an API reference and technical specs on the readers. Have you ever worked with smartcards? I was thinking a USB sniffer might give some clues about what's getting written to the cards.

I'll look into ACS's site, thanks. I've never worked with smartcards before, but I've started delving into the PC/SC API on my XP box. So far I can get it to detect my ACR38 reader, but it doesn't recognize any cards I insert (I've got the one from ResMed and one I took out fo an old DirecTV receiver).

[risktaker99]

The dealer I spoke to said he considered Silverlining software (the Puritan Bennet software for Pb420x) the best of all.

His criticism of AutoScan was that it only kept 5 or so days of data active before you lost the detail & thus in order to keep a long record yu must save the data from the machine at least every 5 days.

He believe it worked that way (this was his opinion) so that users had to keep going in to the DMe/RT to get the data downloaded & thus was yet another way thos folk could charge the users.

I am looking into the possibility of developing an 'open source' program capable of reading the data from Resmed machines (& possibly Respironics ones later) and presenting the data in a variety of ways that we users want (& not what DMEs neccesarily want).

To do this would need a few (about 2-3 ) interested & capable software developers to work on the project.

I am presently looking at anarchitecture for such a program. I need to choose a database (probably MySql) a language (I prefer to do it with Ruby)
and want to include a set of plug-in modules such that data can be read in from a variety of brands & devices (Resmed Respironics and PB) PLUS PO device (Nellcoe & Ohmeda etc:)

This would make the program universal and provide a common base for enhancements and also being open source, and released under the GPL licence, means anyone can take the source code & add their own enhancements providing they pass theie mods on to others.

I am interested in discussing the desgin I have in mind.

DSM

_________________

This is a fabulous idea!! I wish I had the programming knowledge to help out. On a design note, since you're building a generic program could you include the ability to download in the following manner:

1. card
2. serial cable
3. wired ethernet cable
4. wireless ethernet

[dsm]

Great to see so much positive response. James has helped by explaining how he was easily able to read the data from the SQL db & mentioned the charting software he used to develop his MyEncore replacement.

When time permits I'll explain the architecture we are thinking of using but in a nutshell we want to achieve these objectives ...

1 ) Open Source under GPL (means anyone can obtain the code & extend it)
2 ) Would like to make it easy to install & set up
3 ) Modular (use plugins for the main brands of xPap & Recording Pulse Oximeters
4 ) If we can make it so it uses std web browser as the front-end, then it can run over the Internet as well as stand-alone
5 ) Ability to select a variety of formats for the data
6 ) Ability to do comparisons (show one day or period against another)
7 ) Show composite charts that include synchronized data from Pulse Oximeters
8 ) Allow drill down into fine detail

These are some of the design ideas going into the architecture.

Cheers

DSM