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OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

mendelgreenberg.com

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Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#51

Post by utopiah »

jeroenhd wrote: post #12
utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.

The log for "who took the car for how long when and did they fill it up" seems to be much more relevant. Nothing a notebook and a pencil can't fix, of course, but an app is more fun. I don't think it's laziness, I think it's an excuse to do a personal hobby project. Makes perfect sense to me.

> an excuse to do a personal hobby project.

Of course, and I do things like that too. I didn't mean to be critical only to give back some perspective precisely when it's NOT about learning.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#52

Post by utopiah »

bartvk wrote: post #33
utopiah wrote: post #4

wow... so much yak shaving, including priceless bits like "sat with ChatGPT for a bit [...] we came up with OurCar" (I mean... how original is that, clearly powerful datacenters computing over a dump of the Internet was needed), I'm impressed. All this to avoid doing one subtraction (km before, km now) then multiplication (result times average litter/km) in your head. That's a LOT of effort to be lazy.

My ex isn't good with numbers but nevertheless she has a master in education. She has helped many, many children with learning deficiencies. For lots of people, the math is a significant barrier.

Very true, I don't want to presume of people ability.

I do believe though that being able to do a subtraction and a multiplication, even if both roughly approximated, for an adult in our current societies (as in not living like an hermit in the woods) is a very useful skill, even if just not get scammed while going shopping or to know how many items one can buy.

Again this isn't reciting the first 100 digits or Pi or doing (12345-12158) * 0.3223 in your head in .1s, rather it's about (~12300-12100) * .3 and knowing you should put about ~20 bucks in, not 1 buck nor 100, and if you want to be "safe" or "kind" to others you put 30 bucks, a very safe upper bound and be done with it.

OK maybe the 1st time you have to write it down. Maybe you even put your phone out and use the calculator but it should after a couple of times become pretty straightforward.

edit: if you don't have dyscalculia I think it's worth couple of seconds in your life because the ability does improve with practice and it's helpful in plenty of places.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#53

Post by bartvk »

utopiah wrote: post #52
bartvk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ex isn't good with numbers but nevertheless she has a master in education. She has helped many, many children with learning deficiencies. For lots of people, the math is a significant barrier.

Very true, I don't want to presume of people ability. I do believe though that being able to do a subtraction and a multiplication, even if both roughly approximated, for an adult in our current societies (as in not living like an hermit in the woods) is a very useful skill, even if just not get scammed while going shopping or to know how many items one can buy. Again this isn't reciting the first 100 digits or Pi or…

Agreed, you will get screwed some day if you aren't able to make simple calculations by heart.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#55

Post by smileysteve »

fmajid wrote: post #10

Manual data entry is just too unreliable and time-consuming. I don't see how this could work short of integrating OBD-II fuel consumption data combined with some sort of presence tracking.

It's more hardware intense, but yes, add an rfid tag to each key, use a btle obd dongle, centralize computing in an arduino; phone home to a webserver the last logs.

Then at the end of the month debit each account that used negative gas.

The only thing this misses is encouraging fill-up before empty, but it could give notice when the tank is below ¼ before a trip

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#57

Post by pavel_lishin »

We own a Subaru, and the app has all sorts of data in it: the car's current location, the odometer reading, and fuel status, sort of - it only displays the "until empty" distance, and the average MPG. I'm surprised it doesn't show even an estimate of how much gasoline is in it.

So if I were to do this, I'd find a way to read that data somehow, and then I'd just need to know who was driving. (Which, as someone pointed out, I'd probably do with some sort of RFID tag on everyone's keys.)

But yeah, the manual entry part would absolutely be the biggest drag here.

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#58

Post by SirFatty »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #57

We own a Subaru, and the app has all sorts of data in it: the car's current location, the odometer reading, and fuel status, sort of - it only displays the "until empty" distance, and the average MPG. I'm surprised it doesn't show even an estimate of how much gasoline is in it. So if I were to do this, I'd find a way to read that data somehow, and then I'd just need to know who was driving. (Which, as someone pointed…

"I'd find a way to read that data somehow..."

Kind like the ? before Profit!

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#59

Post by Natfan »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #57

We own a Subaru, and the app has all sorts of data in it: the car's current location, the odometer reading, and fuel status, sort of - it only displays the "until empty" distance, and the average MPG. I'm surprised it doesn't show even an estimate of how much gasoline is in it. So if I were to do this, I'd find a way to read that data somehow, and then I'd just need to know who was driving. (Which, as someone pointed…

i have found a surprisingly large amount of success in uploading an .apk to Claude and asking it to extract all HTTP endpoint used and to display them as a Swagger document. most apps use HTTP(S) to communicate with their APIs, so reverse engineering is relatively trivial

Re: OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

#60

Post by thomas_viaelo »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #45

I’m surprised the author went for native apps rather than a PWA for this use

Did you weigh home screen widgets here? For "log mileage when you refuel", a one-tap widget feels much closer to the moment than open Safari, find the bookmark, hit the button. PWAs on iOS still can't put one on the home screen. Curious if cross-platform was the call from the start, or if widgets came up at all.
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