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Announcr Devlog: Arrival announcements prototyped

MVP Objectives for Announcr

  1. "I come home and am announced over a speaker on arrival in my driveway and when I walk in the door"
  2. "I walk into a Target store and am announced over a speaker in a grandiose manner"

Update
I totally recovered the mobile app project and began to butcher it up. There were many dependencies which needed to be upgraded/replaced, and various build issues to resolve. I got through those and started to piece together what I want. It's super disappointing that I took it SO FAR in the wrong direction. Luckily, I had commented out sections/commands that I need vs. deleting, and there was one Unity scene file with enough working UI pieces to get something together.

By mid-day or so, I had a push-button event flow I could use to send an Announce payload to the server and then off to the location device, resulting in.. you guessed it, an Announcement! GPS coords were also running OK, and I fixed up my event loop. I had done a lot of work in this area already which I am very glad for.

The main event loop looks like this: you have a list of locations and GPS coordinates. There are several different tolerances defined... the time since app startup, the time since you last made an announcement, the time since your location last changed, the time since you entered the minimum distance from a device. Basically it's all to make sure that you're roughly in the same spot and that you're within 100 ft of a device. That signifies an "Arrival" event. Then there's an arrival cool-down of a large number of seconds to make sure you don't spam arrivals.

After you've "arrived", you can fire off an "Announce" event. This is completely customizable, but only generated on button press (right now). I'll be adding a user-defined timer to this, or using Bluetooth beacons for better accuracy. That way you can give yourself like 30 seconds to walk in somewhere, or just use a Bluetooth beacon to trigger the announcement when you're close enough to the main entrance.

Note: Arrival events are just being recorded right now but they can be used to run Announcements too. If you're running a business/shop, you might want to use this event to prepare a little welcome package for your customer! For private residences, the arrival announcements are useful in a different way. I.e the "Arrived in my driveway" portion of the MVP.

So around 4:00 I left to go run some errands in town. On the way back, I opened Announcr for the drive home. I selected "Homebase". That gave me my distance to home and began to track it using a really neat lat/long formula. When I got to within 100' of my destination, I was flagged as "Arrived". I set my announcement message to "Daddy's home, come out and help", and hit the button. Lo and behold, the door opened and my boys came out to help with the groceries. Victory! Yesterday's goal and stretch goal accomplished.

Today
Today I am going to spend a little time revising the user flow. There's not really a need to show all the devices in the database, for example, with distance to each one. So I am thinking through a flow which makes more sense.

Stretch goal 1 will be to make the UI for the new user flow.
Stretch goal 2 will be to make a user flow UI/server code for custom Arrival AND Entrance messages

Wish me luck!

Goal for Month
Trying to get to a demonstrable MVP soon so I can make a video of it and see if the implementation of the concept is as cool as it seems in my head.

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