Connecting the Suunto Eon Steel to Android

[Rob Mason]

I've never had any success in pairing my Suunto Eon Steel to my Android phones over Bluetooth LE. I tried a bit of experimentation and managed to come up with the following process (apologies if folks know about this, but I haven't seen this described anywhere on the forum):

1. Install Suunto App on your mobile device

2. Pair the Eon to your Android mobile using Suunto App

3. Close the Suunto App (from within the App so that it is not running in background)

4. Suunto Eon Steel now appears as a paired LE device in your Android Bluetooth settings

5. Connect via Subsurface - works fine, but it is just a little slow downloading.

This process assumes your Android device supports Bluetooth LE.

Hope this helps.

--

Rob Mason

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 2:59 AM Rob Mason <robma...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've never had any success in pairing my Suunto Eon Steel to my Android phones over Bluetooth LE.

It *used* to be a huge pain, because the Suunto EON Steel really wants
to go through a full bonding experience with a per-device IRK key etc,
but at the same time, it doesn't actually advertise itself as being
generally pairable.

I thought Suunto fixed that in one of their firmware upgrades - but I
have to admit that I switched over to the smaller EON Core instead,
and maybe it only changed with that one.

> 1. Install Suunto App on your mobile device
> 2. Pair the Eon to your Android mobile using Suunto App
> 3. Close the Suunto App (from within the App so that it is not running in background)
> 4. Suunto Eon Steel now appears as a paired LE device in your Android Bluetooth settings
> 5. Connect via Subsurface - works fine, but it is just a little slow downloading.

Yes, that fixes things because the Suunto App will do the BLE binding,
and then you're all set. I know I've been able to skip that step, but
as mentioned, that may be because of the slightyl newer EON Core model
(that is otherwise fairly identical).

And yes, it's slow at downloading. The Suunto protocol is actually
quite nice, but it's fairly verbose. And our BLE stack is slow. I'm
not sure where the blame lies: it might be the Qt BLE code, it might
be something we do, or it might just be a bad interaction between all
the different layers involved. It seems to depend a lot on random
hardware details too (ie some phones are somewhat slow, and other
phones end up being _really_ slow).

I don't use the Suunto App any more (I did to figure out the
protocol), but it didn't seem to be hugely faster. It figures out the
"I've already downloaded this dive" a bit faster, but it was
horrendously slow too if you have a hundred dives you haven't
downloaded yet.

And by "horrendously slow" I mean "leave it and come back in an hour or two".

Honestly, if you have lots of dives on it, use the USB cable and a
desktop system to download, and sync with the cloud. Then use BLE on
your phone to download after that - when you only download a couple of
new dives, it's not exactly speedy, but it's not painful either. It's
the "I have tens or hundreds of dives to download" that is just
horrible over BLE.

The USB connection isn't blazing fast either (USB certainly can do a
lot better than what it does with the EON Steel), but it tends to be
"a couple of seconds per dive" rather than "tens of seconds per dive".

Linus