In Ishinomaki Hackathon (which is held in the north to Tokyo every year after the tragic Tsunami strike), our team created a “moving” Google Home.
Below is a movie taken just after we have succeeded in integrating all the components late at night on the 2nd day of the hackathon.

We made a lot of components in such a short time so that I decided to write all the details about how to make this “moving” Google Home before I forget.

Hardware

This is the lists of all the components we used this time.

• Raspbarry Pi (x1)
• Arduino Uno (x…

In the last three sessions, we have made a very accurate location tracking app. In this blog post I use this app and examine the battery consumption.

I’ve been using my app while commuting my office by bike everyday and checked the battery consumption.

My commuting path is around 6 kilometers, and I used Nexus 6p and Nexus 6.

Sorry for Japanese titles for the table.

From left side, the values are

• total time of logging in seconds
• distance of logging in kilometers
• number of locations logged
• battery at the start of the run
• the battery at the end of…

In the last two sessions, we added a background tracking engine + map drawing to our sample code.

Having a short run with the sample app makes you feel it already works like a normal running app as Runtastic.

But you might encounter some situation where your app doesn’t work correctly.
Especially when you are running ..

• under cloudy weather
• in an alley surrounded by tall buildings
• in a forrest or park with many trees

To make your app work more accurate as Nike+ under such situation, you need to make your app log “good locations only”.

In this blog…

In the last post, I’ve explained how to get locations both in the background with proper criteria. Before explaining much deeper location topics, I am going to take a time to implement map feature on the sample app.It is because many location-related apps have a map. And even if your app doesn’t have a map, it often becomes necessary to have a map for debugging and tuning your location tracking feature.

Here is the link to the Google Maps Android SDK official document.

I’m going to follow the same steps as the document above to setup the map first.

Obtaining an API Key

Go…

Tracking a user’s location is the core feature of apps such as Nike+, Pokemon Go, and Uber.
I’ve been making a running app from the time of iPhone3.1, and it took a lot of tries and errors to get accurate location information under various environmental condition. As Pokemon Go is getting the people’s attention back to location technology nowadays, I’ll share basic and practical knowledge of location tracking on Android OS.

Make a project

Make a new Android Studio project and make an Empty Activity.

LocationService class

Our aim is tracking user’s location even while the user puts the app in the background.

We use…

We demonstrated our product “InAppTranslation” in Slush 2016 last December.
After coming back to Tokyo, I wrote a report in my Japanese blog, but forgot to write it in English.

Here is how I applied, prepared, and traveled to Slush last December. I hope this blog is going to be of any help for those who are thinking of going to Finland for Slush 2017.

How I applied

(All the dates and numbers are for Slush 2016, for Slush 2017 check this site.)

Deadline for the application for demo booths and pitch contest was 31st of October.

Here is the list of info…

Recently while I was playing around with Data Binding newly introduced to Android, I found I could utilize this to provide an instant way to localize Android apps to any languages at runtime.

After a few days of coding I made “InAppTranslation for Android” which is an open source free tool to make your app support all the languages using the power of Google Translate.

https://github.com/mizutori/InAppTranslation_Android

This link includes the code of InAppTranslation and a sample app.

Install

Just add a line below to the app module’s build.gradle file (under dependencies section).

compile 'com.goldrushcomputing.inapptranslation:inapptranslation:0.9.3'

Then open the local.properties file and add…

In the last three sessions, we added a background tracking engine + map drawing to our sample code.

Having a short run with the sample app makes you feel it already works like a normal running app as Runtastic.

But you might encounter some situation where your app doesn’t work correctly.
Especially when you are running ..

• under cloudy weather
• in an alley surrounded by tall buildings
• in a forrest or park with many trees

To make your app work more accurate as Nike+ under such situation, you need to make your app log “good locations only”.

In this blog…