If you’re into reloading, you know about chronographs. Odds are you might have a Shooting Chrony. I myself happen to own a Shooting Chrony Beta Master. These are pretty well made devices, and Shooting Chrony has a no nonsense replacement policy.

The only way to interact with the device is via a proprietary 9-pin-female RS-232 cable, like an old modem. Now, this techique was all the rage circa 1994 when dial-up internet was king and everybody had PC’s with two or more serial ports. This is really sub-par when you want to try and connect your smartphone to a Shooting Chrony (yes, this is possible, but more on this later).

I recently bought some Estimote beacons (a 3rd party iBeacon-like device) - largely because they seem like a cool and nerdy kind of thing. It has an Android SDK which will allow Android devices to interaction with devices. With a little big of effort, I managed to create Xamarin.Android binding and port the sample Android project provided by the Estimote SDK.

You can see an example of the app in these screenshots:

The Ping))) is ultrasonic range finder that is pretty easy to use in an Arduino project. In my case, I’m using it to monitor the water level in a sump pump. I have an Arduino Uno R3 (with Ethernet Shield) connected to a Ping))) and a TMP36 temperature sensor that is perched above my sump pump. Every 2 minutes the Uno will send out a ping, and figure out the distance to the water below. The TMP36 is used to account for the air temperature in the speed of sound calculations.

A visually pleasant effect when deleting items from a ListView is to animate the row being deleted by gradually change the .Alpha value of the view from 1.0 to 0.0. If you’ve tried to animate the deletion of a row from a ListView in a Xamarin.Android application, you may observe some curious behaviour when rapidly scrolling through a ListView with many rows: the animation may appear on rows other than then one that is being deleted.

If you’re looking to get into Arduino, and you’re a programmer, the first thing that will jump out at you is the Arduino IDE. It’s best described as “spartan” (to say the least). As I’m used to full featured IDE’s I started looking for a replacement to the default Arduino IDE.

There are extensions to use Visual Studio, but that means me starting up a VM to run Windows which I don’t really want to do for Arduino development. There is a another IDE which looks promising called Maria Mole - but it’s Windows only so not really a contender for me. I need something for OS X. I looked at setting up Eclipse as my default IDE, but ran into some issues with that. Nothing to major, but as I don’t like Eclipse in the first place I wasn’t to motivated to sort things out, so I abandoned Eclipse as an IDE choice.

The next thing I tried was Sublime Text. There is an Ardunio plugin called Stino that turns Sublime into a not bad IDE. In terms of writing your programs, Stino can pretty much do everything the Arduino IDE can do: compile programs, upload them to your Arduino board, import libraries, etc.

One of the handy things about the JPEG format is the ability to store meta-data inside the image using EXIF. There are a few libraries out there for the various programming languages that can help you out with this, and Android actually has something built in to the SDK - the class ExifInterface.

Google’s documentation on writing latitude and longitude to a JPEG are a bit light on details - they loosely hint at the format that latitude or longitude should have. (See the documentation for ExifInterface.TAG_GPS_LATITUDE). The API itself is pretty straight forward, but what Google doesn’t tell you is HOW the GPS coordinates should encoded.

Deploy early, deploy often is a popular goal in Agile methodologies. One easy way to support this to automate your build process. Last year at this time I would just use FinalBuilder to automate the builds of my Xamarin.Android pet projects. It doesn’t take much to set FinalBuilder, and it does provide support for a lot of tasks such as versioning .NET assemblies, manipulating XML, dealing with the file system, and so on.

The problem is that FinalBuilder is Windows only. OS X and Linux types are left out in the cold. As I find myself working almost exclusive in OS X when developing my Xamarin.Android applications, I was looking for a Windows free way to automate my builds.

Enter rake and albacore. rake is, of course the build system for Ruby.

I have a simple little pet project (for Android), and one of the things I wanted to do was to to have a text field that would show me previous values as I typed in the text box (see screenshot below). Of course, this control is already a part of the Android SDK - it's our good friend the AutoCompleteTextView. To populate the drop-down, I have an SQLite table called vehicle_descriptions, which looks something like the screenshot below.

For those wanted the slide-decks and code from my talks at Prairie Developer's Conference 2011, you can find them up on GitHub. Thanks to all who attended.  Maybe we'll see you again next year.

I ran into a curious problem for a side problem of mine where I had some information in PDF files, both text and images.  What I want to do is display the information from the PDF's on a mobile (Android) device.  PDF isn't exactly a mobile friendly format, so I got the idea use HTML.  The next trick then becomes how to get the content out of the PDF's I want into HTML.