Soft-wear-and-tear on meRandom Video Chat AppAugust - October 2022
My first Android app. A hell of a time. Took me roughly 3 months with maybe 150-250 hours (I'm a bad judge of that). The way it works is it searches other users in your radius such as 5 miles and if nobody then it spreads out to 10 miles, then 30, 50, 100, 200, 9999999 miles. So as long as someone is on it, you should be able to video chat with them. Might even be able to use my app with somebody from the ISS, who friggin' knows. It works decent. As you can see from the screenshots, I was able to use it with some friends, and of course my doge Teddy - he's such a gud-a-boi. I finished that app I believe in October of 2022. That's close to the same time of my wedding with my wonderful wife. I recall having a much of my friends download the app and we all tried it at the exact same time to see if there would be any issues with cross channels... of course there was... Kind of a bummer. I had one friend be able to be in the same session as me and a different friend. Audio worked great and video was damn gud. It was a great time to get back into coding after not doing it for about 3+ years. What an adventure. Moisture Detector AppMarch - April 2023 (pico-w) & August - October 2023 (app)
The inspiration came from my wife killing some of her plants. How can there be a way to know how water is in a plant? It seemed easy enough for me. I started this project in about March, 2023. Luckily, I already had some hardware from my past isee hardware projeek and pictures - a raspberry pi 3b. The first language I learned was python, so it was pretty cool to get back into it. Anyway, with the raspberry pi and a capacitor, I was finally able to code. I wanted to make it bluetooth accessable so you could use it on your smartphone. After getting the capacitor code finished, I quickly realized this fuckin pi is gigantic against any plant. This shit looks ridiculious and goofy. I needed something smaller. I used a raspbery pi pico-w. I read up on it and it was just about to start supporting bluetooth. I knew diddle squat about bluetooth but luckily a library came out with it for bluetooth support. It was frustrating but I FINALLY got it hooked up to my phone. I had to download a bluetooth serial reader to test the pico-w. After it worked, it was time for the hard part. Or was the bluetooth on the pico-w the hard part? Either way, it was about It was about July after the pico-w got bluetooth support and now I needed to code my Android app. My basically made a copy of the bluetooth serial monitor, for the most part, and was able to decide which device to select. I would narrow it down to the first 4 letters of my pico-w, that way you would only connect to those devices. I also made an Iphone app by translating my java and xml code to x-code. That was fun... but honestly, SO easy. I'm pretty sure it's much easier to make an Iphone app than it is for Android. After all the trouble, it worked! It was time to 3d print a case for it, which I had a friend who was a machinest and has a 3d printer. I paid it for his trouble but he made me a case for the pico-w, battery holder, and capacitor. Finally, time to mass produce these. I had him print out 5 cases, I bought a pack of 5 pico-w, and got to work on soldering. First time and it was... frustrating. I was terrible at it. I'll have pictures on my hardware page. Got all them working eventually, and it was time to sell. I sold one to my mom (what a supporter. she really pushes me to complete my projeeks. I'm happy and forturnate to have a mother like that), and a sold one to my sister. She didn't pay for it, lol. She said she'd pay me back over the course of 3 months, and I started giving up on the projeek so I told her, "you know, some of these aren't lasting very long and it's your birthday soon. You can just have it." I was selling them for $30 a pop which was about how much others were going for on Amazon. I would probably profit about $7-10 per device considering the printing, capacitor, battery holder, and pico-w. This projeek was finished about October of 2023. It was a great stepping stone to more projeeks. Onto the next one. If you want another side of the moisture detector story, check out my moisture detector hardware projeek P.S. My wife did become MUCH better at raising plants, and she never really used the device, so it seemed like a bust.  |
