Future

This is the wind up of the series of pages about the Vortex Manipulator. I covered what it is and how to build it and I covered the software design in some detail too.

Recall there are 9 apps in the device and, for now, that is all the menu will display. We do have room for more on the device. Only about half the memory is being used and the various things that have to be checked each cycle (heart rate etc) do not seem to be causing any performance problems. So one possible future enhancement is to expand the menu to add more apps, probably by displaying a second page of them, or even a third. But what apps should those be? The current list is:

Clock
Compass
Dalek detector
Gallery
Graphics demo
Heart rate
Notificattions
Set clock
Sleep

Some of these I did not go over in detail. The grahics demo is code I pulled from Adafruit (who wrote the original graphics library, later adapted for Teensy 3 by Paul Stoffrogen). It looks pretty when it runs but it does not do anything else interesting. Sleep was mentioned in the Hardware.cpp section, all it does is put the device to sleep and it can be woken up by the wake button, a physical button not a touch screen button. Notifications was mentioned briefly in the Intervals section in the Software Main post but in no detail because, while it works, it needs more work to be actually useful. I hope to post on that later.

So to add more apps I would first consider replacing the Graphics demo rather than extending the menu. I might consider replacing the clock too because the time is displayed on the menu as well, although not Mars time and not with the special effects.

A possible new app is a step counter, the accelerometer could detect steps and possibly other movements and count them, and display the current count for the day, probably log the day's count to the SD as well.

So there are still things to add to this. As I said originally this is a development platform so there always will be things to add. And if you make one yourself you'll surely add things I have not thought of (though I would love to hear about them).