CED Chronograph Printer?

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Dave Shattuck

Guest
I have been involved with BR shooting for 21 years starting with IR 50/50 Rimfire, then moving on to USARBR Airgun Benchrest. One thing about Airguns is, using a Chronograph is essential in order to maintain consistency! Kind of similar to adjusting powder charges for Centerfire.

I decided on the CED M2 because it gave me the option of using both battery powered Infrared Screens along with regular Sky Screens as most of my practicing is done in an old dairy barn which has no power available, but sometimes I'll move outside, so like using the Sky Screens when doing so.

Now for the problem. The set-up is designed to be plugged into the USB port on a PC after each session in order to download all your stored data, but offers no printer. The trouble is: I'm an Apple fanatic and don't own a PC, and am not about to buy one simply to solve this problem.

So my question to you is: does anyone know of another brand of printer that could be plugged into my CED M2, similar to the way one of the other chronographs printers plug in - and work shot to shot?

I'm getting wicked tired of stopping after each shot to make note of the F/S reading for that shot.

Thanks for your help.

Dave Shattuck
 
well, I've never been a Apple fan due to the limitations Apple puts on their systems for outside developers and that's one of the reasons for your dilemma. I'm not aware of any other chronographs that allow you to connect a printer to them. I sold my Ohler 35P to a friend because all the other chronographs I have store the data on a memory card. I have a CED, Kurzeit, Magnetospeed and now a Labradar. However, even with the memory cards you still have to take notes as to what each series of shot data on the card refers to. If I was a little better in application development I would have an application that allowed you to identify the data on the computer for the following shots. At this point I'm not aware of any app that does this, but I could be wrong. Labrador is working on an app that will send the data wirelessly to a tablet or smartphone. Kurzeit now has bluetooth capability but there is no upgrade path from current systems and you have to buy a whole new system to get that. I think that tagging the data is an area that is being missed by the developers of these apps. Hopefully I'm wrong and we see some apps that will do the job we need.

By the way, I bought an Ipad for myself and gave it to my daughter after a month or so. The Apple user interface is not intuitive for me. Dragging an icon of a disk to a trash can to eject it never made sense to me.
 
Thanks for your response.

I checked with the folks at CED and they now offer a system for downloading to an iMac. The only thing needed is the Stuffix Expander software, so once I get that installed it looks like I'll be all set. Time will tell.

And, as for iMac or PC debate, I guess it's to each their own.

Thanks for your input, and I'm sure that someday even though my main system will probably stay an iMac, I too will own a PC only to diversify.

Dave
 
Dave, I have a first gen CED chrono. I've used the utility to transfer the velocity data to a PC. It's been around for a while. There are a lot of other considerations when you collect velocity data. Are you testing more than one rifle or caliber or bullets or powder, or powder charges or primers or neck tension or seating depths? What are the environmental conditions, temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, density altitude? All these item contribute to the velocity of the bullet as it exits the muzzle. So, unless you capture the factors that result in a velocity, you can't replicate it. Most importantly, you have to tie the value of these factors to that velocity number.

My ideal app would allow you to specify all of the permutations of the firearms and ammunition on the computer prior to going to the range.In other words, lay out your plan in advance on your computer. On the day of shooting, enter the environmental conditions as you start shooting and update as they change to any significant extent. Then as you start shooting according to your plan the velocity data would be transferred, in real time. to the computer for the the applicable scenario. This way you could capture all the relevant data that applies to each shot and it's velocity. So you would just step through each scenario as you follow your plan.

Now there's an old saying " Why measure with a micrometer is you're going to mark with a grease pencil and cut with an ax?" Some of these parameters would fall into that category, such as atmospheric pressure. Changes in atmospheric pressure would have minimal effect on velocity all other factors being nominal.

I'm not aware of any commercially available application that does this, but it sure would be nice. When I was working for Lockheed Martin in avionic systems development we used to call requests from our customer as WIBNIF's or "Wouldn't It Be Nice If".

Shooting Laboratory by Jim Ristow has some of the capabilities I'd like, but no real-time data transfer. The PVM-08 by Kurziet has the real-time transfer but had serious problems in linking to computers from Windows 8 on due to driver issues.

Well, that's my discourse on this for now. I'm working on setting up some cheat sheets so I can manually capture all the pertinent data for each shot string as I test.
 
Jerry,

My requirements are no where near that complicated.

My rifles are all high-grade bench rest quality Airguns.
The Calibers being considered are both .177 and .22.
The distances range from between 25Y to 50Y.
and
Most of the testing is being done Indoors within a barn I own, and only rarely happen out in the elements.

All I'm trying for is to make sure the pellets are flying at the right speeds in order to:
Stay within the required foot pounds of energy for each of the Classes being shot,
and
To maintain the least amount of shot-to-shot Extreme Spread for consistency purposes.
Other than that, it's pretty much a done deal.

I'm just trying for the easiest way to test each gun, and to create a history that's not necessarily in a hand written notebook.

Thanks for the input.

Dave Shattuck
 
OK then, never mind. A few days ago, at my local range a guy was shooting a BM500 MKII from RAW. Quite an airgun. He let me shoot a few pellets down range. It could be addicting. :D
 
I have both a RAW BM 500 in .22 set up for the Open Class (meaning above 20 fpe). I've got that one set at either side of 30 fpe. Then I've got a RAW TM 1000 in .177 set up for the HV Class (under 20 fpe). And, before that, and my oldest two, are a Theoben MPR in .177 set for HV and an Air Arms S 400 MFR in .177 and set for LV (under 12 fpe). All of which have the BR stuff on them, meaning custom stocks, big powered scores and the whatnot.

All shoot lighs out, but sometimes I wonder why I've got duplicate guns for the same Classes. At more than 2 grand each just to buy, plus additional costs to bring them to the top, it all comes out to between 10 and $12,000, plus scopes. They all shoot great and I've won lots of matches, but now I'm starting to wind down and only shoot competitively 7 or 8 times a year.

It's still fun as when I want to shoot I don't have to pack up the truck and drive up to the range, 23 miles each way, only to find it's closed for the day because the Police are running their drills and train exercises. I can bring everything out beside my house and shoot as long as I want without bothering anybody. Either that, or drive up to a barn I own 1/2 mile up the road and shoot Indoors all day long with nobody knowing I'm there.

Yup, it's addictive to say the least.

Thanks for responding.

Dave
 
Dave Shattuck said:
Thanks for your response.

I checked with the folks at CED and they now offer a system for downloading to an iMac. The only thing needed is the Stuffix Expander software, so once I get that installed it looks like I'll be all set. Time will tell.

And, as for iMac or PC debate, I guess it's to each their own.

Thanks for your input, and I'm sure that someday even though my main system will probably stay an iMac, I too will own a PC only to diversify.

Dave
Click to expand...

I've had the same problem....a Mac person, I also have a HP laptop running Windows 7. It turned out that my main CED unit was from 2007, and was incompatible with CED's current PC software. I returned the old unit and they sold me a up to date one for about $80.


Whether you can make it worth with Mac...I don't know, but I tried several times and even wrote CED a letter about my problems trying to use Stuffit Expander. I'm pretty tech savvy in most matters...but was stumped by that one. Here's part of the response I received from CED:

<The original CED Millennium Chronograph was designed for both PC and Mac formats. It used a 9 pin serial port. As the PC market changed to USB, we introduced the CED M2 Chronograph which uses USB download software. HOWEVER, as we RARELY got requests for the Mac version and since there are so many software programs on the market, which allow Mac's to run Windows programs, our engineers felt that it was no longer cost effective to create a Mac specific program. Thus, you would have to add one of the many available software programs to your Mac that allow you to run Windows PC programs on your Mac and then you can download the CED Data collector to run through that program.>

I've been down the road of running Windows through Parallels on my MacBook, and didn't like it...dumped it.

So, my plan is to connect my new unit to my HP laptop, download the data and print from there.

YMMV

George

PS: I bought the HP laptop at Amazon....refurbished, very clean...running Windows 7 Professional for $220 delivered.
 
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Yup, from what everybody's been saying, paper and pencil, along with a calculator, are sounding better and better all the time. Or, at least it will be a whole lot cheaper. After all, I'm not trying for Rocket Science here. I'm just trying to be able to compare one set of figures against the next while at the same time making sure my speeds are where I want them.

Thanks for your input George. It's much appreciated.

Dave Shattuck
 
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