The pieces are coming together to build an app

I've said this in a previous post, but learning to code in a new language is really hard. Like any language, you know exactly what you want to do, but you don't know the words and you don't know how to arrange them. But you keep trying and then one day, it just clicks. You've made a complete sentence with all right words in the right place. And that's what happened with SwiftUI this month. We were able to bring all the little pieces we were building into a prototype app.

 

Screenshots of our first app prototype showing the start menu on the left and the data screen on the right.

We are really happy to report that we have gotten the framework of the app down. We can view live data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and GPS. Then metadata from each session is saved into a log book. We can then view each log entry.

The next steps are getting the full motion data saved to memory and transferring it to the companion app on an iPhone. From that app we can then export as a CSV or JSON. Then we are going to merge the temperature and pressure data. By working in these little building blocks we can iterate and troubleshoot faster. I am not going to lie that part of the learning experience is changing some code and then breaking the entire thing for 24 hours.