How to build an Energy Monitoring android App part 1

Glyn and I have wanted to have an android app to make it easier to access energy monitoring data from phone's and tablets for sometime.

Last year we took part in a student project to develop an Emoncms android App with Mathew Keegan who was studying at the time at Aberystwyth University. Mathew made good progess on the foundations of the app which I've uploaded to github here: https://github.com/emoncms/androidAppDev/tree/master/MathewKeeganAberUni

I've been trying to learn a bit of android app programming to understand what Mathew has developed. I followed a couple of Hello World tutorials and then explored networking and how to update the display. I've written up my notes as a tutorial: How to build an Energy Monitoring android App part 1 here:

Im going to try and continue development in this style by writing tutorials of how to do each step.

I think we should all be able to build our own software (if we want to) and given the rising use of tablets and mobiles as our personal computing devices having at least a basic understanding of how to build an app is enlightening and satisfying to see the results on your phone. Even if you've only dabbled in software before I would like to encourage you to try the tutorial, please ask me if I can clarify anything and feel free to send me a github pull request with edits to the tutorial.

My next tutorial will focus on how to use android graphics canvas to draw a graph that looks like the myelectric graph in the myelectric emoncms module.

I've posted this blog post on the forum's here which is a better place to discuss: