Gauge Gadget

For our new project, we are still working with gadgets but this time around, we are to use advance google visualization tools. The visualization that was delegated to our group is the gauge visualizations. Our first objective for this project is to get a simple gauge visualization working with hardcoded data to be evaluated and then create a gadget based on the that visualization. Other things that we had to do include when creating the gadget is to create a common look and feel for all the gadgets in the iGoogle page. Since we cant change other google gadgets' look, such as gmail, we are basing the look for our gadgets with those look. Prof. Johnson suggested that we install other google gadgets along with our gadgets to create the common look.


Some of the things that we are going to be working on is to decide what of information to use for the gauge. Another would be to fix the problem of overlapping gauges. The overlap occurs whenever the gadget size is adjusted.

Our project hosting site can be accessed here.

Two on Two: 2 Gadgets for 2nd Milestone

For our second milestone, our group has finished two gadgets. The Stoplight gadget, which is a universal gadget that takes a user input source and displays a stoplight image based on the a given threshold, and the Wattdepot-ui-monitorgadget, which is a monitor that connects to the Wattdepot web service and displays the power/energy consumed and the power/energy generated of a given source.

Stoplight Gadget

Features

• Automatic refresh
• Title feature
• Customizable image size
• Able to parse both integers and decimal values
  
• Error handling

Version 1.7 is the latest version of stoplight gadget. The most prominent feature of this version is the automatic refresh is much cleaner. During our meeting with Prof. Johnson, he noticed that our gadget will look a little more professional if our gadget refreshes only the relevant and dynamic information. As in the case for our stoplight gadget, the image, data and the message. These dynamic information will only refresh whenever the image or the data changes and the rest will stay the same . This means that we don't have to refresh all the information whenever one changes. It also eliminates the spinner icon for each information, which appears when the gadget retrieves data. Other functions include the adjustment of the gadget height. This was an aesthetic modification because our gadget allows users to change the image size and when the image is set to small there are extra whitespace below the message. Lastly, we changed the location of the gadget title from the gadget window itself to the top center section of the gadget main display frame.
For the full list of all the features visit our ReleaseNotes wiki.


Wattdepot-ui-monitorgadget

Features

• Automatic refresh
• Able to connect to Wattdepot web service
  
• Error handling

For our latest version of the Wattdepot monitor, we also implemented the new refresh function explained in the Stoplight section above. This feature is much more prominent in the Wattdepot monitor since each of the information displayed is a result of the retrieval of the proper data to be displayed. From the source name to the last checked time stamp, the spinner icon always shows up for each information displayed which turned out to be an eye sore. For the my milestone contribution, I added the error messages to be displayed as part of my error handling. One of the problems I encountered is the appearance of the spinner icon along with my error messages. This gives the user a false sense of anticipation for more information to show up. The solution to the problem is the implementation of the new refresh function itself. Since my error message is due to a missing user input, other information that needs to be displayed might be dependent to the missing input and therefore will show the spinner icon to no effect.
Since we only worked on the Wattdepot monitor for only a month, we only have 2 versions being version 1.2 as the latest.

After the 2nd milestone presentation, we are to change our group project for the second half of the semester. We had a chance to change project after the 1st milestone but I enjoyed creating gadgets that I stayed in this project. The group isn't decided yet but this is the reason why I signed up for the HEEP gadget team for the 3rd milestone.

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.