Cellumap for Android Released!!!

Ok, today's the day! I released Cellumap for Android out in the wild! I did some testing, and it looks OK, but if you notice any problems, please post them here in this thread. ...and if the app runs fine and you like it, please don't forget to leave a good rating for it on the Android Market

For those who don't know what Cellumap is, it's a program I made a year ago for Symbian (and then BlackBerry and now Android) that sends your signal strength and other info from your phone up to my server, where you can then go to the cellumap website Cellumap Cellular Coverage Maps and view your (and everyones) data on the coverage map. Signal strength is probably the most interesting thing to see, but there's other stuff like Cell ID's, Location Area's, etc. too that are interesting as well.

The Android version has a new "Auto-Send" feature that was long over-due. In Symbian and BB you have to push the button manually each time to send a data point, but with Android, just tick the "Auto-Send" button on, and it will automatically send it for you, based on a pre-selected distance that you choose in the settings menu. There's also a "Send 1x" button that will still let you send one point at a time if you want to make a recording of a specific place.

...to download the app, just go to the Android Market on your phone, and search for "Cellumap" and download/install it from there.

Have fun!

Here's a screen-shot of the Android app:


...and here's a screenshot of the web-based coverage map (ok, this point was sent by a BlackBerry, but pretty much the same shows for an Android phone, just not freq info)

 

...fanboy

 

Yea, it's unfortunately not possible to get frequency info from the Android API's The "bubble window" on the Google map is a default for all, so if frequency info is available (like on BlackBerry) it will show, but for Android and Symbian phones it will be empty.

...oh, and Yankees, yes, EVDO RSSI is also being uploaded to the server, I just haven't figured out a way to display it in the "bubble window" yet...

 

Yea, every mobile network should have a MCC-MNC to identify it. Have a look here. For GSM/UMTS it's 100% necessary, but it seems maybe not so much for CDMA, since half the CDMA phones that send MCC-MNC data didn't report it correctly. But the MCC was at least usually right, so I left that there, just removed MNC for CDMA since it was mostly garbage.

 

Thanks to everyone for using it, and helping out as well! Alot of you guys here on WA gave very useful feedback as Beta testers (especially Yankees!). And of course special thanks to dmapr for the coding consultations :cheers:

...oh, a couple of other things I forgot:

-The "Auto-Send" needs to be in the forground screen to work, meaning if you minimize it, or pull another screen to the front, the Auto-Send will pause until you bring the main screen to the front again.

-Keep an eye on your battery, as the screen-on and GPS requirements will drain your battery quickly! I put a battery meter on the bottom just for that purpose of seeing how much battery you have left and how much has been drained. It will also turn to a red color if your batt drops below 40% as a warning.

Sounds like maybe the HTTP connection was not responding Yea, let me know if it happens regularly, and if it goes directly to "Force Close" or if it gives you another option to exit.

 

...sure, coming right up...
(RadioRaiders searches for his baseball bat)

 

Yea, that happened once to me too, but I didn't catch it on a LogCat and hasn't happened again since. I'm pretty sure it's a HTTP connection not responding. Maybe I'll put a time-out or something in a future version to kill that automatically.

When you are zoomed out, all the dots look jumbled together, but when you zoom in to street level you'll see the dots are perfectly spaced. But yea, I had one other request to make the auto-send distance farther, and that I can do for sure in a future release. Actually, right now the auto send distance you select only works when the speed is below 22mph, once you go over that speed the distance becomes 40m, then 80m and 120m depending on your speed. I need to clean it up a little bit in the next release. I'll make a "to do" list of this and any other requests/changes/fixes and make it in the next month or so...

 

Gamer, how long did you wait from when it 'froze' until you rebooted it? In my case (and seems Charlyee) a pop-up notice would appear in a few seconds asking you to either 'Wait' or 'Force Close'. On Android, I haven't ever seen it lock-up with no response....altho on my BlackBerry Cellumap app that would happen when I didn't have a data connection, ie: the phone would try to make a HTTP connection, get no response, and just lock-up and I'd have to do a battery-pull.

...oh, and Cellumap for Android has a force 'screen-on' while it's running, so that should override your regular screen timeout. It may have just been a coincidence for you that after you changed it you had no problems. But anyway, try it with your regular screen timeout and no timeout and see if there's any difference. There shouldn't be, but who knows...

Oh, and yea, I saw your drive from Everglades Airport to Naples, nice I've seen some other nice drives too, so looks like the 'auto send' is working pretty good, ..aside from an occasional glitch...

 

Next time it happens (but hopefully it won't) choose "Force Close" and just re-start the app. It's quicker and easier then restarting the phone. And let me know (post here) how often and in what circumstances you see it happening. Thanks.

 

Glad no freezing Did your points from this morning show up on the server tho? The CDMA part of the server was down for some hours today (back up now tho), so any CDMA points sent during that time were unfortunately not received :O

 

Hey, yea, that's a bug in the BB app I never cleaned up :O. I corrected it on the server side a while ago however, so if your phone shows "GSM 1800" but you upload data, it will show on the map correctly as "GSM 1900".

...and unfortunately on the Symbian and BB versions of the app, there is no "Auto Send" feature, that's only in the Android app :O I may go back and re-work the Symbian and BB apps in the future to include it, but it could be a while...