Project Beautify

So today we had a meeting and we did a couple of dry runs of the presentation. No one seems to be jumping up to volunteer for the presentation so basically everyone is going to try and present and we will choose who we want to present to the class and to the angels. Today Jacob and I presented, Ryan did our first iteration presentation, and Amr did the second iteration. John is going to present tomorrow to our professor.

One of the things that we noticed at the meeting is that the previous sprint we really didn't have cut and dried requirements, or tasks to go after because we were focused on the presentation and getting that through. Because of this we saw a dramatic drop in our effectiveness as a team. We did get some things done, but I think we could have been better. But since we slacked off on this assignment I finally had time to work on some assignments for other classes.

Today I was able to get the stats to update and give us a delta of what the automation software accomplished in the session. I also worked on making the GUI look a little more attractive. This was mainly by putting our FarmAide logo and a background. It took a while to figure out how to get the font color for the labels and to load an image in, but I am pretty happy with the way it turned out. I wasn't able to get the groupBox titles and the checkboxes to change font the same way that I did the labels, so I will have to see if I can figure out how to do that. I also changed the axis of the gold graph to not include the year, to remove some clutter and to allow the Time axis label to be shown.

That's about it for today, we will see how the meeting goes with Joe.

Saturday Work- Finding some Swag

So on Saturday I spent a lot of time trying to find some swag for our angel's presentation. The main thing that we are trying to get is a stuffed pig that has our logo or a saying embroidered on the animal or a t-shirt or something. I found a log of great deals... if you bought 100 of them... the only problem is that for now we just need about 5.

I talked with a man from my church who owns an embroidery shop and he said they wouldn't be able to do it because the equipment is only meant for flat objects. So we can either buy the pigs separately and then get t-shirts and get some screen printing or keep searching.

I did find a place that would do both for a pretty good price. shipping is a little pricey, but we will see. We just need to solidify a logo or saying or something!

A Late night

Well its 4:11 AM and now I think I am finally going to go to bed! But I think I was able to accomplish a decent amount. I found and fixed some bugs in the xml parser. I also hooked up a status label at the bottom of the GUI to show the user what was happening. Installing matplotlib for mac osx was a nightmare, it took a good two hours to figure out, but now it seems to be working, and the graphs are going to look nice! That's about all I can remember about what I did, see the repository for a checkin from me a few minutes ago, I put some good detail there.

Good Night!

Wednesday Work

So in between trips to the bathroom for food poisoning (Courtesy of Carl's Jr.), I was able to get FarmAide be able to harvest trees and animals. As of right now the only thing that we haven't tackled as far as Farmville functionality is gifting, I think John is still working on Neighbor interactions, and harvesting from buildings. Interestingly enough animals are treated almost exactly as trees, the states that they have are bare and ripe.

The next thing that I plan on working on is getting some kind of visual on the GUI as to what is happening. This will probably be just a label that is at the bottom that will have status updates like:

"Getting Data from Farmville: Parsing data"

basically all of our current stdout's going to the GUI.

New GUI up and running

So on Wednesday and Thursday I was able to get the main tab of the new gui finalized. This included hooking up the GUI to the previously working code. One of the things that we ran into, which was fixed by John was that QT widgets were returning QStrings instead of just normal strings, so we were getting errors when trying to plant crops.

Amr and Ryan created a script that would get all of the available crops depending on the user's level, I hooked is up to the new GUI but found out that some of the item on that list are seasonal items and currently aren't valid. I believe that some items have a 'date of availability' variable that we can check, that will fix that issue. We will see

I also tested the keep mac awake script. It seemed to work. The only problem that I had was that my charger is spotty so while I thought my computer was charging it actually wasn't so it died in the middle of the night.

I did find some error and took some screen shots of the errors that I was getting last night, hopefully we can figure them out soon!

QT Creator

Today I found out that the QT Creator or QT Designer is really only meant for C++. Sure you can create a nice GUI and then turn it into python code, but that is only if you are not wanting to connect your GUI to actual code or scripts. In C++ it creates a project which contains a header file and a .cpp file in addition to the .ui file and a .qml (QT project) file. When you want to link a button to a script that you create you have to make a custom slot (A function that is called when a signal is received). In the creator when you try to make a custom slot it just opens a view of the actual code and you are able to slip it in there. Since python doesn't really have header files and the like it doesn't seem like it translates to python very well. So instead of using the QT Creator we will have to create the PyQt modules by hand. It won't be as easy, but we'll get it going, with a nicer look and feel than the previous PMW / TKinter packages.

PyQt

After banging my head against installing PyQt on a mac, two-three days later it is done! Let's just say that it requires Qt SIP and PyQt to be installed and then you have to make them see each other and then you have to make sure that all the tools of PyQt got installed... It was a lot more trouble than it should have been!

But now that I am working with Qt Creator it seems pretty nice. I would like a button here and a text box here and when this button is clicked I want this to happen. I haven't ever worked with a GUI builder like this but I think it is a really useful tool. You then save the .ui file that you are working on and then through pyuic4 you can convert it to a py script!

Now I need to figure out a way to create a class with it and to hook it all in to the current code. We will see how it goes!

New Beginning

So since our project has started I have been doing a really bad job about blogging! But today we had a really good meeting about how we can be accountable and be a lot more effective about the work that we are doing.

Today I tried to get farmvillebot.net's bot to work on my window's virtual machine, it was really slow due to my lack of memory but it seems like the actions performed by the bot cannot be viewed as the happen just a before and after view of the bots action. I think if we looked at trying to actually show what the bot was doing it would have to be automatically doing clicks instead of the events which would actually be taking a step back from what we have done. The event driven way that we are doing is much more reliable and will work for all users instead of forcing a specific screen resolution, etc.

Today I started on figuring out the flow of the product as it would be by the end of the semester, I also tried to do some research of the web traffic and so on for farmville.com but wasn't able to get the peak times that it is accessed just the user info which i posted on our website.

Hopefully we will continue to make progress, it seems like John got the bot to fertilize a neighbors farm as well as post a message on their farm saying that he did it with the help of FarmAide. Well it's time for bed!