The process
Group assignment
We, as Vujade Fablab teams, divided the different platforms between us and each one started documenting their use to be compared and shared with the group and it can be found on these links 1 2 3. I will be working on MIT App Inventor as I already have experience with the platform
01| As you see, I already have many projects on MIT App inventor from 2023 and I also won first place in adult team category for creating PAM
02| I first created a new project for FabLab Review
03| These are the main section of this IDE, The palette where you can find all that component you can think about for building and App, the views to see the design of your App as your building and alinging the components, the layers of the components, and the properties which will change based on the component you select.
04| The main Pallettes are the User interface that include the buttons, text labels, input test, sliders, images and list picker are more. the properties of each will change when added to the canvas/phon view.
05| The layout pallets is one of the most important things you need to learn to do, because the arrangement of the element will depend of the nested layouts you create. adding a vertical scroll arrangement with 100% width and height then adding horizontal arrangement to keep selction and buttons aligned.
06| These are the list of the sensors available on the smart phone that we can connect to and use for different projects. Like screen tracking, phone gyro, magnetic field, etc.
07| Connectivity is where we can set up the connection for IoT via bluetooth or WIFI or arduino
08| Extensions is where we need more extension that can be added for more connectivity options and can be found on MIT App Inventor Extensions
09| After adding the components and changing the priorities and the alignment, we can move to the blocks screen to strat coding
10| when selecting any the components added, we will get the list of the functions, commands and attributes related to each.
11| This is a simple code to program a button, on Click function of Button1, Label1 text will change to "Hello World!"
12| then we can use the AI companion to connect the our smart phone and view real-time simulation.
13| By scanning the QR Code real-time simulation will start on your phone
14| the app can also be compiled and share on store
- Feedback: I find it one of the best IDE to create interfaces and Apps
- Challenge: IoT is challenging but im willing to learn
Individual assignment:
01: Creating my App
01| I created my app using MIT App Inventor platform. I designed the two clips, left and rightt, I added list view to search for Bluetooth devices and I added a number of text labels to update the status of the connection. as well as adding Calibration button to set the acceptable degree within the threshold define on the clips.
02| App inventor provide block programming functionality that eases the use of syntax coding. here I duplicated the same commands for the left and right clips, calling on the bluetooth connection and sending some parameters to the ESP32 C3 microcontroller
- Feedback: I have previous experience using MIT App Inventor, so the interface itself was not difficult. Connecting it to external devices was a new area for me to explore.
- Challenge: Next I want to pull data from the clips into the app and plot it in a clean chart — that would give more insight into the user's movements and how often they moved without responding to the vibration reminder.