My Green Tracker is an android app where you can type in the number of hours you have used your lights, and number of minutes you have used running water, and it will convert your values into kilowatt-hours and gallons respectively. Then, it will also compare your values to the national average and tell you what perentile you are in for energy and water use.
Many 110 concepts were used in the making of this app. I assigned values to variables my using math commands to complete conversions. I used if statements to determine which statement it should spit out, such as if the users values were above or below the national average. I used the Log.v("TAG","entered submit") syntax in android studio to find errors in a similar manner that you would use the system.out.prntln("") method to find errors in eclipse. I also coded a constructor, declared fields, initialized fields, and created helper methods. The xml file that I used in android studio to format the appearance of the app was very similar to how we used scenebuilder for the Chat110 problem set
link to the app in action!One of the main challenges I ran into was limiting the decimal places in a double for when I was coding the percentages compared to the national average. I basically googled different tecniques and finally found one that worked with my code that used a "BigDecimal" class. It did make my code a little messier and created more variables than I would have liked, but it got the job done. I also ran into a couple of issues with my conversions being off, but I concluded that this is because there are a lot more settings that would need to be added to make the percentages and conversions more accurate, just from a math perspective. This would include users entering the rate at which their water comes out of their faucet, or how many watts their lights were actually using. As far as new concepts, most everything that I worked on for this app was new to me, however, I found that there were more similarities than differences when it got down to adding the functionality to the app.
I honestly did not expect to make an android app when the hackathon started, but I was inspired by Morgan's android workshop and said "Why not?". I put myself out of my comfort zone for sure. I definitely got familiar with android studio, and feel confident with the layout. I wanted to make a functional app that let people know where they stood with their energy and water use, so that they could be more aware and hopefully shoot for lower percentages, and I accomplished that.
I plan on continuing to work in android studio, and hopefully learning how to add multiple activities. I would like to add more customizability to the app, where the user can enter in their rates, and make a profile. I would like how to learn how to create graphs, so that the user can track their usage over extended periods of time.