The climate of Bangalore is unpredictable. You can’t trust the blazing sun.
One of the problems I’m facing now is. Clothes getting wet on rain.
Most often, I’ll be in the middle of something when it is about to rain. Sometimes I forget about the clothes outside.
The pain of seeing wet cloths and reusing current clothes forced me to do something about it.
Sometimes my friends help me “hey bijo, there is a chance of rain. Take all you cloths”
I thought of building something similar.
1 | while (clothes are outside && there is a chance of rain) |
To solve this quickly, I jumped to a solution without considering many things.
I’ll build an app; I’m not considering any other options 😉
Logic is simple
When cloths are outside, get rain probability from any weather API.
If it is above a threshold, give an alarm.
and some nice to have features
Show forecasts for the next few hours, plan washing accordingly.
The alarm starts from a silent notification to nuclear strike alarm.
This time I don’t want to build this formally, so I decided to work on MIT app inventor.
It is a tool helping new programmers to build android apps without a great amount of coding.
The end product of App inventor will be pleasing only to developers. Due to outdated looks and limited customizations you’ll feel this app is from the 2010s.
I decided, for now, this will be for my personal use. Later I’ll clean up everything.
Got familiar with app inventor within an hour or so. API calls, web elements, JSON parsing blah blah hundred different things at last with so much effort.
I’ve built the first version.
Now I clearly understood the effort took by developers when they say “woh kar saktha he,thoda time lag jayega”. this may be the first time I typing Hinglish.
Ok, let me introduce my app. I’ll give it to you once I’m able to make more than 50 API calls/day 🤑
Using this app is simple. When you (plan to)wash your clothes open this app. You can see forecasts for next hours as icons, decide accordingly. Or just tap clothes are outside.
Done. The app will take care of everything. When there is a high probability of raining in the next hour/minute/second app will start giving an alarm.
< contd >
