Auto Buddy Android App

AndyCr15

AndyCr15

AndyCr15

Soldato
Joined
28 Apr 2011
Posts
15,738
Location
Barnet, London
You may have seen my 'Bikers Best Friend' app, this is basically the same but renamed for cars.

A handy app for all vehicle owners, be it for locations, maintenance logs, to do lists, MPG calculations. Hopefully everything you could need.

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GARAGE

- Add up to 8 vehicles to your garage
- Get MOT and service warnings
- track how long (time and miles) since you replaced certain parts of the vehicle
- Fuelling logs Record miles, litres and price
- MPG for each vehicle (as you add fuelling details)
- The cost spent on each vehicle

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MAINTENANCE

- A Maintenance log, log any work you do on the vehicle
- Include any costs in the log, for total costs to be tracked
- Mark Maintenance as Service or MOT or leave as just a regular log
- Select parts replaced and it tracks how old they are (miles and date)
- Add historical work, don't worry if you've owned the vehicle for years and just got the app, set the date the work happened and it's logged

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TO DO LIST

- Log future work that needs doing
- Record the quoted/expected price of this work
- Include a URL so you can find parts later

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ANNUAL REPORTS

- Fuel and Maintenance
- Different stats like pence per mile
- Average tank
- Miles Per Gallon

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LOCATIONS

The app is preloaded with
- UK race tracks
- Upcoming Auto Shows
- Biker Hotspots in the UK like Ace Cafe, Rykers and Loomies.
- Traffic, downloading live traffic data and see it on your map
- Your own favourites. Add and remove as you wish.

All these are listed by proximity to you.

Any of these locations can be navigated to (by linking through to Google Maps)

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CLOUD BACKUP

If you're using Android 6.0 and above and have App Data backup turned on, your data will be backed up to the cloud each day.

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PERMISSIONS

Location... for the map usage.
Storage Access... at present the traffic data is downloaded to your device, then parsed.
Click to expand...

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From the few reviews I've had, people like the logging on maintenance jobs. Personally I like that and logging fuel ups, which then gives me annual reports including a total cost per mile (add maintenance and fuel costs per mile)

I've been working on it a couple of months now, so it's stable and reasonably bug free.

I'd be keen to know your feedback.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androidandyuk.autobuddy
 
I've never used Fuelio, didn't even know it existed. From a quick look at its play store listing, it does look a very complete app.
 
mrk said:
If you can implement an import function to import already stored data from say Fuelo, then I’d give this a go for a few weeks and see how it compares.
Click to expand...

If you want to upload a backup, I could take a look. If I can convert it to a JSON file, it should be reasonably easy.

xs2man said:
Thats a great suggestion. I beleive you can export feully data as a csv, so it might not be too difficult for that. I have many tens of thousands of tracked miles already on there.
Click to expand...

I have loads of info in Fuelly too. Luckily I don't do many miles so I moved over the last couple of years to my app. I don't see where the option to export Fuelly info is? **EDIT** Sorry, found it now.
 
The colour scheme is annoying me, in that I would have thought it should be very easy to change. In one xml file you define Primary, Primary Dark and Accent. Surely I can just change these when someone selects a different theme... no, apparently not.

Dark text, the hints are kinda meant to be less obvious. I'll have a fiddle and see if I can make them lighter though.

The icon is quite basic, as unfortunately that's not something I'm good at. I'm might look for a designer at some point to make me one. I can hopefully do a transparent background though. **EDIT** Made transparent already.

Send the file to ** removed now used ** and I'll see what I can do. If I don't get to it today though, it might be a while as I'm off to Santa Pod tomorrow. I appreciate you taking a look though and giving some feedback :)
 
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Thanks, I'll see what I can do with your data. I'll let you know once I've looked at it and implemented to import code!
 
Well, in some ways it was easier than I thought... the getting JSON from csv was anyway, using this site. Very nifty.

Then there were all kinds of hurdles. Firstly, Fuelio only asks for your odometer when you fill up. I use the trip counter. Wasn't too hard to sort. I had noticed one of the reviews says it calculates MPG wrong... which I found maybe why as it you use the miles the odometer suggests you've used, with the rest of the info in that log, it's one step out... if that makes sense? Anyway, got round that. Got round the completely different date format.

it was actually quite a fun challenge :)

Mrk, I'll email you a new apk with the necessary code and the two url's to use. Thanks.

**EDIT** It's funny, when I see someone else has a much more complete app than me, looks better, probably better functionality, it's a little disheartening in some ways. Then I remind myself I've only been doing this for a few months, they're a pretty big setup (I think) and will have been doing it for years. I then have a challenge like this and it reminds me, the main reason I'm doing this is because I enjoy it! If I can make an app I use myself, then all the better!

Initially I couldn't think why you might use my app over a 'better' one. Then I realised the reason would be that I'm hear and listening to suggestions! :)
 
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Thanks :) I might have to do more code, as different places will export in a different format, but now I'd done it once, it shouldn't be too hard to import other data. Unfortunately I don't have the know how to do it all within the app. I would need to be sent the exported data to configure.
 
Have replied to check how you're entering the urls. Just tap 'Fuel' or 'Maintenance', enter the url and press enter.

For my app the odometer reading is optional. If you don't enter it for a while, it finds the last one and adds all the fuels since then to work out what it should be.

I've had many great ideas from forum members already from when I first posted about it as 'Bikers Best Friend' in the Bikers forum, so looking forward to seeing what else people suggest. I want to keep it relatively simple though :)

When it exported, the date went "2017-07-27" and mine uses "27-Jul-2017". Wasn't actually too hard to sort. Dates seem very odd in java though, Strings, Dates, Calendars, MilliSeconds... it's all quite odd how much you have to convert things around.
 
Fixed :)

I've had a small breakthrough in my Regular Reminders app, although it syncs well with your Google account using a Firebase online realtime database, I've wanted for some time to work out how to export the SQLite database that the info is stored in. This evening I've cracked it!!!

Really I wanted this more for Auto Buddy though. I think there's too much info to be dealing with an online Database, and in fact at present I'm storing it all in SharedPreferences, which I have been told I should do for such large amounts, but I hadn't learnt about SQLite when I started this app. So, now I can backup and restore an SQLite database, I just need to go ahead and change all the code to store the app data in one! I'm actually not sure if that's an hour or a days job! I'd best wait to my next day off to be safe :)

Anyway, I'm just rambling. For the user, it wont really make any difference, except the export and import of data facility. As it stands, as long as you're on Android 6.0 and have app data set to backup, you'd be fine anyway, it auto backs up shared prefs every night and would put it all back on a fresh install. (Not dared test it yet mind...)
 
Some good things there, thanks. A few I've seen myself but not got round to fixing. The search for example, I've had on my list for ages for it to react to every letter typed, no need for the button to do it.

For stats, you mean just a few more? Highest this, lowest that? There's a few averages I could add in. Fairly easy. Monthly breakdowns would take a bit more work. Are they wanted?

Tbh I thought everyone used a trip counter! :) The benefit I guess I thought was if you forget to log one. I've never forgot to reset my trip counter, but I think sometimes on a group ride on the bike, I might have been in a hurry and not logged a fuel up. I'll have a think about the maths of giving the option to do either. Might not be too hard actually. Enter one, it calculates the other.

What's the TCO? Splash screen?
 
Oh, ha ha. I quite liked having that there myself. I was wondering about a pence per mile figure (fuel and maint). Maybe I look to calculate that over the last 12 months?
 
That's interesting as an early version did that to someone else and I turned things down and it was fine. It doesn't do that in mine for example.

I'm away for a few days so can't do much. You could uninstall and install again?
 
I did have a GPS bug on another app. It ignored a variable and polled every second. I'll just fix it at 3 hours. Will be home this afternoon and can finish the backup/restore database option at the same time.
 
Over the past few days I've been working on a fairly large UI update. I think it generally looks better now (turn off background image). I'd really appreciate any feedback before I release to the store - APK Download

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