Notices

Doing some digging, I found at least three apps (Fuelpad, Car Mileage Calculator and Carman) that somehow measure car mileage, mpg, etc., after some input from the user. Maybe there are others.

Not sure which of these applications would work for what I need or which does or will work in Maemo 5 (as I have an N900 on pre-order like most others on this forum). I drive (and fly) a lot for work and must record my miles driven for my monthly expenses. Unfortunately, I frequently forget to write my starting miles from my odometer down (am typically in a hurry) and am constantly estimating my miles driven when I compile my monthly expenses at the end of each month.

It would be great if one of these apps could utilize the N900's GPS upon starting and stopping the app (or pressing "start" and "stop" within the app) as far as registering miles (or km) driven, and would then send that data to a log file, or log it within the app. Is this possible? Is it possible with any of the aforementioned apps?

Of course, I'd still have to remember to "start" the app when getting in the car!

Any input appreciated!

Haven't used carman, but the other two don't use the GPS.

you have to input the km seen in your dashboard, the fuel (lt) added and the cost everytime you visit the gas station and they calculate the rest from this info. have a look in their descriptions in the download page, if you haven't already.

hope it helps.

My solution: Gnumeric (or, for the N900, you could use KOffice) + a spreadsheet file. No GPS integration, as you might suspect.

As Saturn already told, Fuelpad does not have such a feature, but I have been thinking about adding such (I'm the author of Fuelpad). The problem is that I personally don't need such a feature, so I don't really know, what might be expected from it. Another issue is how accurate the distance calculation is from the GPS data.

GPS fix to GPX fix gives a strait line -- as the crow flies distance, not miles driven. When I forget to check the odometer I use the mileage from from Google Maps directions. If you had a GPX route file used by Maemo Mapper and others you could calculate the driving distance because you'd have lat/lon for each turn and points in between.

I know. Calculating the distance between the points:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great-circle_distance

I have been experimenting with this for other purposes. I do also know that liblocation library includes this calculation

http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-fi...nce-utils.html

and some applications on maemo already use it (ecoach for instance).

My doubts were in the cases where the fix is lost. You'd probably have to do some filtering with the location.

This is a little off-topic but: I took a little test last weekend. We drove the exact same route back and forth. My wife's VW Touran measured the exact same distance 270.6 km both ways. I recorded the route with maemo-mapper and calculated the distance with my little python script. The first one gave 267.9 km and the way back 268.7 km. The distance measurement error in cars is typically less than 1%. Anyway, the GPS calculated driving distance is nearly within this error.