Request for Resmed SD Card feature

[RMD_software]

Hi all,

I am a software engineer working at Resmed. Seeing as I am working on SD Card area of the software. Does anyone have any SD Card related feature requests for the next generation of Resmed product?

I'll be more than happy to note it down and communicate it to people, and if it gets approved i'll go implement it.

for example I have noticed that there are some people who want all the files (data) on the SD Card kept, and never deleted, etc.


Disclaimer: I do not represent Resmed, what I say is my own opinion only. I do not guaranteed your suggestions will be implemented.

[chunkyfrog]

Since SD cards are freely available in 4 and 8 MB capacity, and up, why not let it fill up?
It would also be very cool on Elites and Autosets to have the sleep quality always on.
There is room on the card--why not?
If I had my druthers, why not delete the plans for all Escapes?

[RMD_software]

Yes SD Card are rather large, many GB in memory. I agree with you, why not let's just keep logging!

I wonder if you would be happy with notice/warning when the SD Card fills up and becomes full? Would you accept the case that the card is full and no more data is logged until either the old data are erased, or a new card is inserted (it will, with my calculation, take 2 years to fill up 4GB card)?

What do you think of the idea of you can go and put any file you like on the SD Card? So you can back up your movies or share it with your camera if you like...

[131]

I work with dataloggers, a standard option is to have the memory wrap around if the data buffer is full, simply overwriting the oldest data. Having to download weekly so I don't lose data is a pain.

[archangle]

The current designs seem to be finicky. If someone or some program on a PC writes a file to the card, the CPAP machine will reject it and want to format it before it will use the card again. In particular Macs seem to write some sort of index file to the card and the CPAP will object when you put it back in the CPAP.

Please use a more standard data format and make it more robust.

Please record total leak as well as unintentional leak. Total leak gives you a better idea of leak rates, and it can also be used to detect problems like clogged vents or vents blocked by pillows.

[RMD_software]

The current designs seem to be finicky. If someone or some program on a PC writes a file to the card, the CPAP machine will reject it and want to format it before it will use the card again. In particular Macs seem to write some sort of index file to the card and the CPAP will object when you put it back in the CPAP.

Please use a more standard data format and make it more robust.

Please record total leak as well as unintentional leak. Total leak gives you a better idea of leak rates, and it can also be used to detect problems like clogged vents or vents blocked by pillows.

I like the idea of making the card more robust by allowing any files on the SD Card, I have a test version of the software right now which will ignore other files happily... even directories, etc so this is most likely going to be put into the final version


I am going to ask some people about the total and unintentional leaks you spoke about, and see if they think it is a good idea to add it in there... at this stage I haven't heard anything about it yet...

[RMD_software]

I work with dataloggers, a standard option is to have the memory wrap around if the data buffer is full, simply overwriting the oldest data. Having to download weekly so I don't lose data is a pain.

I think at the moment it is already done with the S9 when it removes the older data when date rolls forward. However, if we are going to have a card that allows any files (including potentially movies and image) the algorithm for determining when to delete files can be non-trivial... and can take a lot of time.. for example if a 4GB card has 3.5GB of music or pictures and the rest are S9 data files, and it is almost full (say 200MB left), then how many days should we keep? what determines the size of data to keep? it is almost case by case basis... so the algorithm is not going to be easy..

Having said that.. u do make a good point.. i'll think about it more...

[Pugsy]

Personally I don't have a need to put photos or whatever on my ResMed SD card. I won't ever use it for that. It's all I can do to remember to put it back in the machine after using it on the software. If I start using it for other stuff...I am pretty sure it will get lost or at the least I will forget to put it back in the machine.
If not in machine...no high def data...are they thinking about changing that little annoying thing by any chance?

I would be happy just to have it not erase the high def files for a year or two. Honestly a year is plenty for most of us anyway.

[RMD_software]

Personally I don't have a need to put photos or whatever on my ResMed SD card. I won't ever use it for that. It's all I can do to remember to put it back in the machine after using it on the software. If I start using it for other stuff...I am pretty sure it will get lost or at the least I will forget to put it back in the machine.
If not in machine...no high def data...are they thinking about changing that little annoying thing by any chance?

I would be happy just to have it not erase the high def files for a year or two. Honestly a year is plenty for most of us anyway.

hmm... thank you! =D That's a really good point that most people are not going to use for other tasks... no wonder sometimes software comes out to be not very useful... because it's so hard for software engineers to step back and see it from the user's perspective... we are too caught up in covering ALL possible cases....

in terms of high def data... there is simply not enough memory in the machine to keep it... it's like using a computer without a hard disk... you can keep some files in the RAM but eventually you will run out space, the SD Card is required to keep all the High Definition data...

[Pugsy]

in terms of high def data... there is simply not enough memory in the machine to keep it... it's like using a computer without a hard disk... you can keep some files in the RAM but eventually you will run out space, the SD Card is required to keep all the High Definition data...

Yeah, I guess you are right but can't blame me for wishing.

You do know that your competition (the other R brand) stores everything but flow graphs on the machine storage for I think 3 maybe 4 weeks before it starts getting written over in the machines internal storage? So if I forget and leave my card in the computer over night I haven't lost all the high def...just the flow rate graphs. I am aware that the flow graphs are very large so I can accept that limitation.
Yes...I own both brands ResMed and Respironics.

Question? Any idea why the "invalid card" message occurs when we can't blame it on a Mac sticking a file on the SD card?
People using Windows are having it happen.

[RMD_software]

Question? Any idea why the "invalid card" message occurs when we can't blame it on a Mac sticking a file on the SD card?
People using Windows are having it happen.

From what I have noticed is windows likes to stick funny files into the SD Card as well. On windows 7, I have seen a recycle bin file of some kind created in the root directory when I tried deleting files.

I'm pretty sure the software is told to ignore hidden files though... so this must be a "hidden" file in that you can't see it, but it is not really hidden.

If you enable view system files (not just the hidden files option) in the windows folder options, then you might be able to see this, it doesn't happen all the time...

The other possibility is if when you insert a blank formatted SD Card, and you pulled it out about 2 secs after the "reading SD Card" message comes up, it corrupts the Identification.tgt file, and so if you insert it the next time it will come up with the Invalid SD Card error (this has been fixed by me for the next generation of Resmed product).

Never edit the Identification.tgt file because it doesn't like being edited... and never copy the contents of the SETTINGS/ folder from a folder on windows.. because due to dos8.3 naming convention the extensions on those files gets corrupted by windows... *sigh*... so many OS problems... (this is the next thing I'm going to fix)

And... if you notice this happening again, please PM me with some details about what you did and what's on the SD Card.. i'm very interesting

[RMD_software]

You do know that your competition (the other R brand) stores everything but flow graphs on the machine storage for I think 3 maybe 4 weeks before it starts getting written over in the machines internal storage? So if I forget and leave my card in the computer over night I haven't lost all the high def...just the flow rate graphs. I am aware that the flow graphs are very large so I can accept that limitation.
Yes...I own both brands ResMed and Respironics.

I like that idea! ... no I didn't know as a matter of fact.. but now I do ... then again i'm just an engineer trying to make a living... it's up to the higher up guys to decide...

It will require hardware changes, which may or may not need mechanical changes... and definitely a significant software change... and the extra memory will impact on the bottom-line...

i'll mention it to someone

[idamtnboy]

I don't know if it's been fixed in the newer S9s or not, but it would be good if the data file record start time for all the files for a particular session were the same. My S9 is almost 2 years old now. I had one before it. Not sure if this one has the same issue, but my first one would have differences in the start time of up to one minute between any two files. That makes it confusing when looking at the graphs in Resscan and the events and flow changes don't correspond time wise.

Get rid of the journal.dat file. And consider getting rid of the crc files. Is it really that important to have a scheme in place to prevent data manipulation? Having studied the STR, _eve, _brp, _pld, and _sad files, I don't see any need to change or consolidate them, nor to change from the EDF format. Also consider modifying the data scheme, particularly for the SAD file, so that external data from an oximeter can be merged into the data files.

I'll second the idea of keeping at least one full day's, if not 2 or 3, detail and high resolution data in machine memory so it's not immediately lost if one forgets to put the SD card in. A year's worth of high res and detail data on the SD card would probably be more than sufficient to keep us all quite happy! Keep the round robin overwrite scheme for overwriting older data with newer data. Just stretch it out to a year, or six months at least.

I'm glad to see you here. It makes us users feel good that Resmed, or at least some of its employees, are paying attention to user thoughts and concerns.

THANK YOU!

[sol]

how do you get rid of this message on the S9 Elite other than return machine to provider "error setting reset to default settings contact service provider"

[idamtnboy]

how do you get rid of this message on the S9 Elite other than return machine to provider "error setting reset to default settings contact service provider"

I'm going to take a wild guess and say, "Take it back to your provider!" I've never seen or heard of that error message. It sure don't sound good to me. (Bad grammar intended!)