Never say never: Improving Stoplight Gadget

We are closing in on our 2nd milestone , this day next week, and we are in confident on finishing the two gadgets in time. For this week, we are still working on the Stoplight gadget, a continuous work of improvement, as well as the Wattdepot gadget. The Stoplight gadget had a major rework in terms of the formatting of the data it retrieves from. During our weekly meeting, we agreed that our messageSourceUrl formatting was too error prone from the user end. A user might get confused on setting the upper and lower bounds that relates to the corresponding message to be displayed. Our solution is to create a new format. This new format differs by having two columns, one to include the integer values to be evaluated and the other with the corresponding messages.

A significant feature are the empty spaces to visually show the upper and lower bounds of the values to be evaluated. In conjunction with the format change, we also stopped parsing the value as integers and instead parsed them as floats to better represent values a user might use which includes decimal values. Jarret created an updated message script to facilitate these changes. The updated script can be seen here.

As for the Wattdepot gadget, the main improvement we did was that we've successfully got our gadget to connect to the Wattdepot server. We are mainly using tests information gathered from Wattdepot. Other changes includes changing the source into a user input source instead of drop down menu, lowering the retrieve interval from minutes to seconds and including the source and the type of data in the gadget itself. The type of data that a user can choose from are Power Generated, Energy Consumed, Power Generated, Power Consumed. The data types' description can be accessed to Wattdepot's site.