Valarm update: Yoctopuce Yocto-Knob

We’ve released v1.1.0* of Valarm Pro,  which includes support for the incredibly fun and useful Yocto-Knob sensor†. This sensor allows you to monitor and record the status of up to 5 potentiometers. This includes normal rheostats/potentiometers, as well as buttons, switches, and any sensor which operates by altering resistance. This includes force-sensitive resistors (FSR) and garden variety [...]

Launched!

In October 2011, while I slept, my deeply adored motorcycle was stolen. I was lucky because I had full coverage and my insurance company replaced it without much trouble. But what a check couldn’t replace was the thousands of hours I had spent riding through the California canyons and racetracks, learning every nuance of that [...]

Android Handler/Message and JSON

Implementing IPC on Android™? The Message class allows you to pass data from one thread (or AsyncTask) to another within your app (like that pesky UI thread!). It’s all helped out by Bundle and passed through a Handler. The Message + Handler architecture is all reasonably well-documented by Google and elsewhere. But what if you [...]

Performance and Bandwidth Conservation

Valarm and big, fat JSON and KML (Jason and his Camel?) The Valarm Tools web application is a typical Java web app running on Tomcat servers. That said, we do quite a lot of RESTful ajax/JSON style data retrieval: in the interface, for public APIs, or for data export (KML, CSV). Although JSON is much [...]