msDroid Issues?

[318aye]

http://www.msdroid.com/

I can't seem to get the gauges to resize consistently. Anyone else here screwing around with this? It's not as mature/functional as shadow logger (will often crash, missing features, etc) but the interface and gauge customization are sweet! Might even hold me over until shadow logger gets the same user adjustable front end, which would pretty much be the be-all-end-all.

[piledriver]

Tried 0.2 a moment ago.
It alledgedly connects OK and the BT serial adapter shows a solid light, but it still seems to be looking for an ini, which is the wrong one, may play with it and see if it does something interesting provided the correct ini, although I also don't see a way to select one or even select an ini file.
Right now all the gauses show zero except for a few NANs and a highly bogus temp reading.
(to be expected if it's parsing garbage)

Haven't found any way to scale it yet.

[318aye]

Tried mine this morning, of course the laptop then didn't want to see the bluetooth serial port. However, the app worked great. I had played with the gauges previously and it reset my work when it detected my ini file. The dash portion worked as expected.

[piledriver]

Tried mine this morning, of course the laptop then didn't want to see the bluetooth serial port. However, the app worked great. I had played with the gauges previously and it reset my work when it detected my ini file. The dash portion worked as expected.

what are you using?
(phone & ms version)

[318aye]

Phone is a galaxy nexus on 4.0.4. It's an ms2v3e. Phone works great on both shadow logger and now msdroid, but my laptop's bluetooth device management seems to get cranky. I think there's another build for msdroid if you're not on the latest android rev.

[Trev16v]

Hi guys,

Many thanks for the feedback (I think a couple of you have sent me emails, which I hugely appreciate and will reply to).

The alpha test builds I uploaded so far were a snapshot of development at the time, and are really just good for test purposes and to give people a flavour of it more than anything, and to get feedback and first impressions. I have done a lot more work on it lately (especially so during a holiday this week) so I will aim to upload a new build within the next week (hopefully just a few days).

Regards

Trev

[piledriver]

I'm running glsenders finest (MS2E-gslender 2.6) at the moment, FW is not recognised.

It's a variant of the latest 3.3x alpha FW.

[Trev16v]

Ah, okay - I think that I quite simply haven't got the .ini for that firmware variant bundled with the application. I can dig out that .ini and ensure it's included for you with the next release. In the meantime, if you like you could try adding the .ini file yourself within the external memory memory area on your device, in the msdroid/ini/ directory that msDroid unpacks when it's first installed. The application should hopefully find the new .ini you added and match it to your ECU's firmware the next time you run it.

[piledriver]

That worked peachy with the ini copied over, it found it and did the right thing.
...doesn't seem to rescale/rearrange for my screen or orientation, but the gauges I can see read properly.
(It does change screen orientation, but I the gauges stay in the same arrangement)

Seems very sensitive to BT signal, I assume readout in lower corner is FPS?
seems to vary between 5-12 FPS, phone is low spec, so may be CPU bound, but the BT serial adapter is class1, I get ~30M range with a class1 BT dongle on the laptop.

It complains a bit about page read errors after connecting, but seems solid once I start logging.
Using shadowlogger on same phone it's 12-14 FPS out to ~10M.

I sent myself a log, where do I send it?

[Trev16v]

That's a good start with the .ini file. I'm glad it picked it up and worked.

The page read errors are something I've already addressed ready for the next build so I shouldn't worry too much about those. If you get a page read error on connection it does mean however that any variable that's calculated as a function of any constants will be wrong, so you may then get incorrect gauge readings. At this stage it is probably best to treat the 0.2 build as a means of getting a feel for it really, but hold tight for the next build (0.3) to start using it more properly.

The figure at the bottom left is a FPS figure as you correctly mention, and particularly low figures are a problem with that early test build of the application itself. You should see an improvement in the next build as I think some improvements already done will address that. On the devices I have been developing with (HTC Desire, Desire HD, One X) the rate has been at least 10 on MS2, but I'll ensure I test and optimise with lower powered devices.

(Edited)

[318aye]

It was able to grab my ini right away. I think even with the featureset you have now, If you get it all functioning, it'll be a great app. I really like the native log viewing, was a nice surprise even though I was just looking for a dashboard with gauges.

[scudderfish]

Shadowlogger is probably always going to win in the RPS stakes on phones primarily as it does so little on the device and offloads the grunt work to the remote server. MSDroid and MSLogger are both processing, evaluating equations, logging and displaying the data on the phone. Fancy UIs don't come for free Multi-core devices help as you can thread the code so that one part of the program is talking to the MS, another part is processing/logging the previous frame of data, and another part is updating the UI, but on a single core phone, those three steps have to happen sequentially and the read rate will drop compared to something just reading from the MS in a nice tight loop.

Regards,
Dave

[piledriver]

Welcome back, Dave!
Thank you for "Freeing" mslogger!

I suggest the possibility of turning off or greatly lowering the refresh rate on screen to allow fast logging.
(async) REAL gauges don't repond instantly, they have mass...
That alone may help a great deal if you are trying to run fully sync'd.

Make it an option for those who want to log at reasonable speeds then look at the logs later.

For those that fast gauge updates are the priority, go as fast as you can.

That would probably be a win for all.

I actually got MSlogger working ~solidly this AM after initializing the BT, connecting with Shadowlogger first, it does some BT init voodoo that sticks.
(debug/logs sent)

...probably never going to get > 15 FPS over BT anyway, but IIRC Android 3> can support USB SERIALdevices?

(but ...I was devastated once I figured out that the Nexus 7 lacked a bloody sdcard slot )

[jnovak]

What are the firmware requirements for MSDroid? I have an older tablet that I might give this a try but it is 2.2 build. AFIK, most of the graphics rendering did not happen until later Android builds.

I really just wanted a dashboard output for the MS. I would not tune with this type of device when it is so simple to do on a laptop.

[Trev16v]

2.2 (API8). I'll shout when I get the next build up because to be honest you'd probably want to try it first with the new fixes.

With regards to FPS, indeed msDroid will probably be better suited towards devices with at least a reasonable bit of oomph, but it's not too demanding. For instance, my rather old Archos 101 (I believe there are several versions of this - mine is I'm guessing the first) has a slow processor and msDroid is usable. But it's nicer on phones like the HTC Desire / Desire HD for instance, which are already pretty old now. Obviously it's lovely on my HTC One X. On the graphics side of things I guess it will always be a little bit 'heavy' because it has a little bit of overhead from the fact that all gauges and widgets are produced from SVG sources, via an SVG library I wrote from scratch especially for msDroid. But on the flip side I can produce all sorts of nice gauges and whatever for it quite quickly, which should be nice. When I have the time!

What I will say is that some MS2 firmware variants appear to be very fussy about spacing between byte writes (so-called inter-write delay) and, with it being impossible to guarantee control over precise timing of writes at the other end of the link (due to all the various buffering and message framing that takes place along the way), in practice the FPS has to be walled at something like 10 or 12FPS for some Bluetooth / MS2 combinations to work. However, if recent MS2 firmwares have eliminated this delay by improved serial buffering or whatever then this would perhaps no longer be an issue (which would be my hope).

[Shotgun]

I'm trying to run msDroid from a LePan tablet. I get a parsing error when installing the apk. I'm going to give MSLogger a shot, too.

[piubrazil]

Tried to install MSDroid on Galaxy S, but got an error like pack analisys or something like. Same on an Huawei Ideos S7. Both runing android 2.2. Need to be a version higher than 2.2 for MSDroid run properly?

[Trev16v]

I've had a few reports of 'parse error' when people have tried to install the APK. I've had this before with one of my devices. It does seem that there can be quite a number of causes. What solved it for me at the time was to use some sort of application manager app from Google Play, and use that manager app to install the APK. I can't remember offhand which app I used to do that with. But it's worth giving it a go if you want to try the current APK before I release the next one.

[piubrazil]

I ended up buying a new phone to try the applications running on android. Now I have a Galaxy S3 running android 4.0 and finally managed to install MSDroid. Tomorrow I will try to make the connection with the Mega and I'll post the results.

[swifty]

hi trev im now looking at getting a bluetooth dongle to do this with a little confused with setting up the braud but sure ill work it out will the app be updated with launch control and rev limit adjustments as these will be very useful for me for changing setups when out depending on traction etc cheers matt