Windows 10: USB IrDA devices no longer work in W10

I have been successfully using VMWare's free VMware Player to use IrDA in Window 10 to get my Polar watch data. I need IrDA to download the data off my Polar watch, which records my heartrate, distance, altitude data, and from a sensor on my bike ride workouts, and for my other sports activities.

All of the software it took was free, but there was a learning curve. There are a few of posts out there you can google that describe how to do this, and it is obviously a bit of a round-about solution to get the data off the watch, but it works, and it will buy me the time to either ditch the watch for another heartrate monitor/bike data recording solution, or for someone to write an IrDA stack for windows 10.

In the VMware Player environment, I loaded a current version of Ubuntu. In the Ubuntu environment, I loaded an Ubuntu utility called "Wine", which creates an enviroment that runs my Polar Precision Performance software. This software reads the data off the watch.

In Ubuntu, you can find free software librarys that support IrDA. I found the software, "Ircp Tray" and "irda-utils" (don't know if I needed them both, all I know is my system works <g!>)

I just plug in on USB-based IrDA adapter, choose to connect to in on the top-right part of the menu-bar, start the transfer with in the Polar software, and everything just worked! ;-)

A final rub was moving the data files out of the Ubuntu/Wine environment and into the Polar software environment in my Windows 10. There are multiple ways to do this.

You may choose to ingor the general "best practices" rule not to allow VMware direct access to your Windows 10 harddive, and you might choose to write the data directly to your Windows 10 harddrive. I make my life a bit more complicated by using an intermediary USB memory drive to transfer the data, as follows:

I find my Polar data in Wine is in a folder at the following path:
/home/[USER]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Polar/Polar Precision Performance/[USER]/2015

I copy the day's .hrm and the .pdd files for that day's bikeride/workout over to a USB memory drive and from the USB memory drive, after I've closed the VMware Player, into my Windows Polar environment on my harddrive, where it is at this path in Windows 10:
"C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Polar\Polar Precision Performance\[USER]\2015"

When I run the Polar software in Windows 10, my daily workout data is displayed normally as though I had synced it there normally!

 

Well, using Ubuntu is free but not that easy for the average user. I would install Windows XP or whatever I have and install the software there. To get the data you can copy the folder in guest and paste in a folder in Windows 10 (host) which is much easier.

 

No change from the W10 Fall Update either! *Mad

 

No, once they remove something they usually don't give it back, unless there are many user complains about it. Try using the IrDA adapter from the virtual machine running Windows 7.

 

Don't need a VM, I have the real thing. There are lots of people with $1500-$2000 so-called dive computers that are really mad about this.

 

If they start complaining to Microsoft, they might add back IrDA support with an update. Isn't there a third-party workaround yet to add IrDA support in Windows 10?

 

MS is stone walling the chip manufacturers.