Handlers handling handles
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After some testing of the Handler implementation in Field Day, I’ve determined that it is actually working! I was finally able to look at the data that I had been writing to the database.

Databases in Android are stored in internal (private) memory. There are Android apps that let you look at the files on your device, but only for external storage. The internal storage is private. What I ended up doing was adding a function to write the database from internal storage to external storage. Once it was on external storage, I used a SQLite Viewer Android app to look at the database and it looks good!

I did some research into the application state when the device screen is turned off. In our old application, Seshat, the activities would die when the screen was off. That’s not good. We want to be able to turn off the screen and hang the Android device from our person some how. It’s useful to have our hands free. After a couple hours of research, I determined the libraries we want to look at are in the PowerManager library on Android, particularly the PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK state. I wrap the methods I want to happen when the screen is off in what are essentially ‘start’ and ‘stop’ methods. The methods were not executing with the screen off, so I researched some more. I think what will ultimately happen is switching the SensorSampleActivity to a Service. A Service in Android is one of the top priority processes. It’s one of the last to die to if the device needs more memory. It can continue running even if the Activity the started it has died. Since the Activity is now working, I’m going to hold off in converting it to a Service.

The last thing I worked on this week was Bluetooth LE in Android. Tara gave me a BLE shield with an Arduino attached to test my code with those devices. Android provides a BLE example in Android Studio so I’ve been working with that. However, the example they provide has deprecated code so I’m working on modifying it to the new setup. It’s not working yet, but I’ve only been working on it for a couple of hours!

sqlite-fieldday
Sample of sqlite database on Field Day

Field Day Application :)
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We’ve begun work on the new $FieldScience Android application! This application is yet to be named, but what do people think of the name FieldDay? I think it’s snappy. 🙂 I created a shell in Android Studio and pushed the code to our Gitlab repo. All of the developers have been able to checkout the code locally to their machines. The old application has been archived and made read-only in Gitlab.

The current developers of the application — Nic, Charlie, and myself — met last week to discuss the details of the application. During the meeting we discussed the basic outline of what we want the application to do. There will be ‘skins’ for each sensor, and all of those will interact with a basic communications library that is built to interact with all of the sensors that we have. There are many things that the old application — Seshat — did well and we discussed those and the pieces of code we want to keep — camera option on sensor skins, writing to csv, sending to database. Android applications have very particular states and processes that they go through. Through some research, we have figured out that they way our old application handled those could have been part of the problem with it crashing a lot. There is still more research to be done in that area, because we don’t fully understand it but we are getting closer.

We are not going to focus on the aesthetics of the application right now, but we did decide that we liked the front/main screen of the old app and will keep it. I’ve added that to the new application with a few enhancements. I made the skins circles and made the colors stand out more. You can see the difference and changes below (Seshat is on the left, new application on the right). Prettier, don’t you think? 

Seshat Main ScreenNew App Main Screen

 

Did I mention Android Studio?
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This past week I’ve been working more on Android development for the $FIELDSCIENCE application that we develop.

I mentioned in my last post that we’ve moved from Eclipse IDE to Android Studio IDE, and that involves migrating projects. The migration from Eclipse to Android Studio is not as straight-forward as Google sets it out to be. Android Studio uses a different build process (gradle). The project architecture is set-up differently, and different files are created during the build process.

I finally think that our Android application is in the form that Android Studio needs, with an updated YoctoLib library! This code has been pushed to git on hopper and can be checked out from any machine, with authentication. I’m working on a ‘to-do’ document of getting the code and importing it into Android studio.

Android, Android, oh yeah and some more Android
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The past week, I worked on a variety of things — setting up the wordpress, researching archaeology surveying techniques, and setting up our field science application with Android Studio.

In previous years, the IDE that we used for Android was Eclipse. As of earlier this year, Google is no longer supporting Eclipse as the Android IDE and has switched to Android Studio. Things are different in Android Studio and I’ve been working on trying to set up Seshat and get it working. I’ve been running into errors about gradles and builds and libraries, so I’m trying to figure out what’s going on there. I had it working, but realized that I needed to update the YoctoLib library, and when I did that things went down the drain again. Once I have it working I’m going to create a document that will explain what to do.