PC-Rower was a piece of software produced for my dissertation at Durham. The idea was simple, plug rowing machines into a computer and create images of boats racing down a river that can be projected in front of the rowing machines. It was created using SWT from the eclipse project and communicated with the rowing machines through a serial port on the back of the PM2+. It worked really well and the Durham University boat club found it helped performance during training.

Unluckily as I was finishing the project Concept2 produced a new rowing machine with a USB performance monitor, a company founded and produced similar software (albeit only on windows), the Java support for USB sucked and I was off traveling for 3 months. Consequently the project died a premature death. I decided to open source the project and if nothing else has it provides a good implementation of a (reversed engineered) serial protocol.