apps4arduino – Meters for Arduino on iOS, Introducing Wijourno!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Meters for Arduino is now available for iOS! You can get it on the App Store here:
http://itunes.com/apps/metersforarduino

It communicates with Meters for Arduino on Mac, which just had a 1.1 update. You can get it on the Mac App Store here:
http://itunes.com/mac/metersforarduino

Meters for Arduino on iOS works with the magic of Wijourno. Wijourno lets you communicate with your iOS devices and your Mac.

It’s a lot of fun, since you can send messages to specific devices, or broadcast a message to all devices. I’m imagining things where (for robots) you could have the iPad displaying lots of diagnostics and such, the iPhone would be the controller, and the Mac would be the data logger and connection to the internet!

Check out the apps4arduino site for more information, including some details on how you can use Wijourno in your own Apps. Can’t wait to see what people are going to make with this!

Posted in: apps4arduino, Programming, Projects.

RoboBrrd Food – Using the Redpark Serial Cable

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Remember a while ago, when I was able to send data through the MFi SkyWire cable? It turns out, now there is a cable designed for hobbyists, with an SDK, by Redpark! They were very kind enough to send me a cable, so I figured that the first thing to try would be to feed RoboBrrd!

Here is a video where I explain everything in detail!

View video on YouTube

Here is a link to the code on Github!

What is next? For WWDC 2011 legacy sake, I will probably try to drive DOGCOW robot with the iPhone’s accelerometer. This time though, the cable would be attached to an XBee so that it will be wireless.

Posted in: iPhone, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Apps on the Desk

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, December 13th, 2010

I have been coding up an App storm the past few weeks!

First off, I got an actual phone that runs the Android OS! The user experience is sort of meh, I guess it’s a personal opinion sort of thing. What they did on the Android OS was separate some functions out to the hardware. I have to admit, it’s a bit confusing to go from the mindframe of everything will be accessible via the screen to pressing actual buttons. The menu button is great, though.

Making Android Apps is done in Java (yay, my first language!) through Eclipse. It will be fun to do some of the advanced things on this platform, like Augmented Reality. I would love to Augment explosions, so you can blow stuff up with your mind (er, smartphone), without harming anything. Imagine how much more peaceful the world would be with such an App?!

Next, KiloWhatt a la iPad: Split Screen View

The split screen view is really important in iPad Apps. KiloWhatt, right now, is the only energy management App for iPad, so updating its Universality is quite important. Making split views is, of course, more tricky than it seems. There are some really bad gotchas that can get to you. The one that got me was auto-rotation, it was sneaky. (You have to have autorotation enabled for all views).

All that is left in this version is to get all the information appearing, and make some popup view controllers. I missed the deadline for the App submission before Christmas, so I think I will work on this more for a few weeks to improve everything, like adding in the easy-peasy plist sorting capabilities.

Sorting data in Cocoa is breathtaking. Imagine you have a NSArray of NSDictionary…

forrst

HOW BEAUTIFUL IS THAT?! SERIOUSLY! IT TOTALLY DESERVES CAPS LOCK!

I also want to add in some Three20, Twitter, and Game Center.

Finally, the crazy particle kaleidoscope.

Kaleidoscope Particles iOS Cocos2d from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

This is using Cocos2d for iPhone. It is amazing. This actually runs at 60fps on an iPhone 4, and rarely drops to 58fps. I was trying to use Core Animation for a lot of things, like a Crazy Stars revamped, but Cocos2d is definitely better to use. They have lots of documentation, examples, and friendly people on IRC who help you out.

What I want to do with this App is add in some Box2d, so that I can fling the particle around and it will be bouncing all over the place! It would also be really neat if I can add some satellites around each of the emitters. I really enjoy the way single pixels show up on a retina display, they are tiny and crisp, so it would be interesting to see those flowing around the emitters.

Special shout out to Ken aka Retro for sending me 20 chips that I can use as the biocore in BEAM robots! Oh, and these hilarious Robot Monkey tissues!

To finish off, here’s a nice photo I took a few weeks ago:

Posted in: Android, iPhone, Programming, Projects.

Canada Spirit!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Canada Spirit is now available on the App Store! Woot! It is a Free App, with an optional In-App upgrade. You can check it out here:

US: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canada-spirit/id394637853?mt=8
Canada: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/canada-spirit/id394637853?mt=8

The App has actually been complete for 3 months now, but there were complications along the way. It’s a long story:

For Apps that use In-App purchases, you have to have your App reviewed (without the In-App purchase capabilities) and rejected. This takes approximately 1.5 weeks. Not to mention, that you have to make the App without the In-App capabilities, which, depending on the complexity and time dedication, could be a few days. We’re already looking at 2 weeks waiting here.

Once your App is rejected, you can finally test the In-App purchase sandbox part of your App. SWEET. Add a few days for debugging. We’re up to a total of about 2.5 weeks used to be waiting here.

This is when the crazy part happened to me. For the In-App purchase, I selected the option “Canadian English” for the language. When my App moved to “In Review” (yesss finally!), they removed that language, which forced my In-App purchase to be in a “Developer Action Required” state- and thus no In-App Purchase approval. The whole point of submitting your App (without the In-App purchase capability) to be rejected was to get the In-App purchase approved.

For this, an additional 1.5 weeks were added. We’re already at 4 weeks here! >_<

Depending on how carefully you read the guidelines for the App Store, then you can be waiting about a month. That’s what happened to Canada Spirit. It got caught in the payment for hardware devices clause. This added another 1.5 weeks…

Once the App was resubmitted, the In-App purchase language options changed AGAIN. Luckily though this time the App Store review team actually contacted me and I was able to fix the In-App without having to go to the back of the line. YAY!

You have to have a lot of dedication to survive the App Store review process. Canada Spirit went through 6 weeks of poking and prodding just to get to you guys, so I hope you enjoy it Post your screenshots of whatever photos you decorate on Flickr so that we can see them!

Also, sharing this story isn’t meant to be against the App Store at all. I still enjoy the App Store as a consumer and developer! It is to cast some awareness on the time investment you will have to make if you want to do some In-App purchases!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

S7GraphView Zoom & Pan Code

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Here is the code for the S7GraphView Zoom & Pan modification that I mentioned a while ago for the s7graphview iOS framework.

DemoS7GraphView-ZoomPan.zip

If anyone out there improves it more, please leave a comment!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

Movable Graph – s7graphview

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, September 6th, 2010

One of the pitfalls of core-plot is that it is hideous to try to interact with. Panning back and forth on the graph slows to a crawl. Zooming requires scaling down the whole graph, and is probably over-complicating the process. Plus, you can’t really add a title to the graph. In HS the teachers purposely take off “5 points” if you don’t have a title to the graph! I really want to do a good deed and help improve the graphing on iOS devices.

The s7graphview framework is really lightweight and does what it has to. Only problem is that it can’t pan or zoom. I took a look at the code and managed to move variables around to the right places to make it work. Check out the video:

You can see a few bugs though, especially with the axis lines. Once those are fixed, I’ll be using this new graph framework in KiloWhatt and then releasing the updated graphing framework open source! With some sample code for iPad and iPhone too.

Hopefully this will make graphing on iOS easier for everyone. In a couple of weeks I can’t wait to see more graphs!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

KiloWhatt 1.1 on the App Store!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, July 10th, 2010

KiloWhatt, the energy management and cost calculator that I created, has been updated to version 1.1 and added to the App Store! This version includes an enhanced interface for the iPad, as well as support for iOS 4. =)

Be sure to check it out at

itunes.com/apps/kilowhatt

!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.