Gas mileage / Oil Change tracking

**TinSoldier** · 08-29-2007, 07:57 PM

Can't wait to try it out.

Will it be hard to add a way to track miles driven for different jobs I do and generate a monthly report on it?

**jcrumpton** · 08-29-2007, 10:23 PM

When I get this one up and running, I'll tweak it a bit for job tracking. To me, the seem like completely seperate apps... you don't want to make fill up entries for each job.
The trickiest part will be emailing/printing, and formatting the report.

**parksgm** · 08-30-2007, 12:05 AM

Originally Posted by jcrumpton

I should have screenshots in a day or so. The dev environment has been a bit of a learning curve. I've found it is MUCH simpler to implement as a .NET addin, rather than trying to build the UI in SD.
You enter the odometer reading, it calculates the mileage. Eventually, I will have it fill in the odometer reading via the OBDII interface, but not there yet...
Enter the amount of fuel, and either the total fuel cost or the cost per gallon... it calculates the other.
You can optionally also enter the fuel grade, brand and station location.
You can configure it for gallons/liters, dollors/euros/pounds, miles/kilometers, MPG/KPL/Liters(/100 Kilometers), and preferred fuel grade.
The items that it tracks for you are: fuel economy (average and last tank), distance per tank (average and last tank), and fuel cost per mile/kilometer (average and last tank).

I used AutoBase for a couple of years (until i switched to Windows Mobile)... great product.

Would more sophisticated analysis be difficult to implement? For example, since speed can be determined from the GPS, could the app calculate "highway miles" as all miles traveled above 55mph for at least a certain duration of time, and "city miles" as miles under that limit, and then give a highway/city mpg estimate?

The OBD integration sounds wonderful...but why not just calculate the miles traveled from the GPS track?

**onidragon** · 08-30-2007, 12:34 AM

Subscribed

**jcrumpton** · 08-30-2007, 09:39 AM

That's a great idea. The advantage to using the ODBII interface is that it would only have to be done each time you fill up... retrieve and store the current odomoeter from the car's ECU, then calc distance between this reading and the previous. If I use GPS data, the process would have to be running continually in the background... to record distance and speed every few seconds or so. I have some concern about a via boards performance... The detailed analysis of % of this tank that was burned at < 50MPH vs over would be really nice though.
Does the GPS system record a track? Where and what format, etc? If it's already storing the track for me, then it would be easy enough to use that data.

**parksgm** · 08-30-2007, 04:21 PM

Originally Posted by jcrumpton

That's a great idea. The advantage to using the ODBII interface is that it would only have to be done each time you fill up... retrieve and store the current odomoeter from the car's ECU, then calc distance between this reading and the previous. If I use GPS data, the process would have to be running continually in the background... to record distance and speed every few seconds or so. I have some concern about a via boards performance... The detailed analysis of % of this tank that was burned at < 50MPH vs over would be really nice though.
Does the GPS system record a track? Where and what format, etc? If it's already storing the track for me, then it would be easy enough to use that data.

Good point concerning process time...I hadn't considered that (I'm running a P4 2ghz, and I often forget that others are not running such fast hardware). I don't know if SD generates/can generate a GPS track log, but I'll look around and see what I information I can find here.

**jcrumpton** · 09-04-2007, 09:43 PM

I got sidetracked a bit.
I wanted to use combobox-like controls... like SD uses in their settings screens. Those complex controls do not seem to be exposed anywhere, so I made my own. They are not SD addins and can not be used directly in SD, but you can reference them in a .net addin and use them as a single control. They have the basic combobox functionality... top, left, caption, text, description, items, items.add, items.remove, etc. I changed the layout from what SD uses to make better use of my screen. Caption is at the far left, buttons at the far right, text in the middle and description below everything else. They have their own button class so you can change the buttons, but other than that, they are not skinable. I'm trying to make .forecolor and .backcolor properties, but haveing problems getting it to work.
Don't mind the colors... those will change...

I also made a keyboard/keypad .net control. It's got the same skinning/color limitations (so far), but you can change the buttons. When you instantiate it, you can specify keyboard or keypad mode and enable or disable the button to toggle between them. It has a caps lock key and the button labels change to reflect the caps lock status. Each key raises an event in your .net app (keyclicked) and returns a string (currentvalue)

Working on a textbox control now... like the textbox on the music search screen.

**TinSoldier** · 09-05-2007, 03:43 PM

Looking good!! I like it. Can't wait to beta test it for you.

**jcrumpton** · 09-06-2007, 12:28 AM

New screenshots....

**pRoFiT** · 09-06-2007, 12:44 AM

Nice app. I wanted an indicator that would tell you how much money an hour you were spending or how much a trip cost. You would input how much the gas price was and it would auto calculate based on speed and MPG how much money you were wasting

That would be great.