Scuba App Review: Nitrox Tools

Nitrox Tools

Version: 1.5
Price: $5.99
Platform: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Description: This is an enriched air blending and planning tool designed for dive shops.

Pros: Calculates top-up blends, bleed-down blending, Mix + Mix fills with banked gases, and top-off fills.

Cons: No way to print out data or export it off the phone.

Bottom Line: At $5.99 I think this is a great app for every dive shop employee that performs gas fills. Although it happens rarely enough, I’ve gotten my share of tanks from shops that cannot provide you with an accurate fill. This app eliminates the guessing and, in a very quick and easy way, calculates the right blending of gases and avoids having to rely solely on all the old-fashioned math we learned back in high-school chemistry and math classes. Every mix we attempted to “blend down” or “top up” came to within 5-6psi of actually making for a mix that was within 1% of our target O2. The only downside to this app is that you can’t print your results. For more common fills it would be nice to have printouts hanging on the wall next to the fill station.

To purchase, go to Nitrox Tools.

Special thanks to Phillip George Chambon II of Scuba World in Orlando, Florida, for walking me through filling a few tanks and checking the math in this app against real-world data.

__PADI Rescue Diver Michael Dombrowski, President of DomCo Electronics, Inc., is an Electrical and Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience specializing in iOS applications and rapid prototyping. He has created apps for the educational industry, including The Organwise Guys, and for the dive industry with RB Planner, as well as prototypes for the Arduino Community. To see more, visit his website at_ www.DomCoElectronics.com._