This program is shareware. You can use it, distribute it (in an unaltered form) and generally have fun with it. I accept no responsibility for any loss etc. It took a fair bit of effort to write it so if you feel you would like to pay something for it (say
5.00 ?) you are welcome to. At any rate, I would appreciate any comments you may have about it or just something to tell me you are using it. If you want to get in touch with me you can E-mail me at:
G.B.Bishko@sheffield.ac.uk
Snail mail:
G.Bishko,
Flat 5, 9 Whitworth Rd.
Sheffield
ENGLAND
S10 3HD
Introduction
This application represents my first foray into Psion 3 software. The basic goal was a rudimentary way of tracking petrol consumption. As usual it got a little out of hand. The program works on the assumption that each time you put petrol in your car, you fill it to the brim and record the number of miles travelled since the last fill up. If you don't do this, you can keep track of intermediate top-ups by noting the litres put in.
The program expects litres as the unit of petrol volume: all the pumps in Britain seem to have gone metric. It still gives petrol consumption in miles per gallon as I can't get used to litres per 100 k.m. If I get enough demand from the 'States, I'll do a version for U.S. gallons, as long as someone tells me the conversion rate!
The program presents a scrolling list of "fill-ups" and allows choices to be made from a menu. There are the usual options for adding and editing entries as well as a totalling function. Two graphs can be drawn from the data: an histogram of MPG vs miles and a line graph of miles per day vs days (this also shows MPG as grey bars because the correlation is often quite good).
Installation Instructions
Petrol requires its own directory:
\petrol
Petrol.opa will run from any drive but its load in module (grpah.opo) and the icons will want to be in RAM. You may like to have the application in a sub directory on FLASH with another sub directory in RAM to hold these extra files. The four files needed are:
petrol.opa Main application
graph.opo Module to draw graphs
pump.pic Icon (should be in RAM)
lemtec.pic Icon (should be in RAM)
Instructions
On first use the program will create an empty file to use. You can rename this if you want to, and the program can cope with multiple files.
The next thing to do is to add a record to the database:
Menu: Edit/Add provides a dialogue for this to be done. You must enter a number of miles, the number of litres and the cost of the transaction. A short note can also be saved.
Once this is done, a box comes up showing statistics for that fill-up; killing this box returns to the scrolling list.
The rest of the menu items should be self explanatory but I will give some description of the two forms of graph.
Histogram
This graph shows the M.P.G. achieved in each fill-up block, against the miles travelled. The width of each block is scaled by miles travelled.
The initial dialog box allows you to choose which records to graph and the y axis maximum and minimum. The y axis values are set automatically. Should you change the records to be shown, the y max & y min values will be rescaled and the dialog displayed again.
The graph is initially drawn with labels on the axes. The will be removed by the first key press whilst they can be re-shown by pressing "L". The next key press returns to the main screen.
Line Graph
This shows M.P.D. (car usage) vs days. The vertical lines drawn correspond to the first day of each month. The grey bars show the M.P.G. achieved on each tank. The line is not really valid in this case as each point is an average over the previous time period.
The same dialog precedes this graph as the last. It should be noted, however, that in order to calculate a value for miles per day, the first entry in the list is passed over.
(.txt)