What has changed?! $FIELDSCIENCE & YoctoLib

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In our $FIELDSCIENCE Android application we use a library from Yoctopuce.com called YoctoLib which works with hardware purchased from them. We use Yoctopuce hardware in our Ambiance platform, and in the Ambiance skin in the app.

This library and code was working — recognizes the USB Yoctopuce devices that are plugged into the device and reading sensor data from them — the last time I used it (~July). Since then, something has gone wrong. The application will no longer read data from the sensors plugged in. I finally got it to at least recognize the device, but no data is being read. I suspect that this happened because of the move to Android Studio. Android Studio must have internally changed the way it uses APIs, which is what I am trying to figure out.

This further pushes me to believe that switching to Bluetooth to use the Yocto devices is necessary. Since the Yocto devices have to plug in via USB, each time I need to test the code, I have to upload the code to the Android device and then unplug the device from the computer so I can plug in the Yocto devices. This makes it difficult for debugging. If the device is plugged into the computer, Android Studio will constantly log messages from any application in real-time to the screen. Android keeps log messages even if the device is unplugged, and will load them once the device is plugged back in, but it’s all the messages (which is A LOT) from the test at once. It’s hard to go back through and figure out where something went wrong.

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.