newbie needs advice!

[Sirgijoe]

First off I hope I posted this in the correct section. if not I deeply apologize!

Second off,, my experience with autoit is basic, I have done a few things, but nothing elaborate, but part of this whole process is for me to learn some more stuff, and at the same time get a useful program that I can use regularly.

Now, Down to the meat of the question...

What I am trying to do, is create a program that can keep track of my flight times, battery usage. and other useful stuff for my rc hobby <addiction>.

is there a way to do this in autoit, perhaps in a GUI or something with drop down menu's and text input to a save file that remembers what info you selected.

basically a menu to select from one of five categories " Airplane, Helicopter, Boat, Car, and Battery "

then depending on he menu you selected, for example, if you selected Airplane, you could then input in your flight info < date and time of flights > batteries you used for the flights, and then a comments block or something.

then by selecting what total info field you are looking at, have it bring up all the info for that specific vehicle or battery. so in essence if you selected "foam trainer plane" it would show you total hours of flight done on that airplane and amount of battery packs used total, from dates then to now. or possibly even select a more detailed look, and not only show before said info, but include dates and times, and your comments made.

I hope this is making sense, and is something that is possible in autoit.

if there is an easier way with a different coding language please by all means make your recommendation, I do have basic experience with other general types of coding as well..

Also, before this is brought up. I know I can easily do all of this in excel, but I would rather not, for learning purposes, and I am sick of excel =-p..

thanks in advance for all of your advice!

[Realm]

Hello Sirgijoe,

Absolutely, this all can be done with AutoIt.

For building a Graphical User Interface, you will want to look into Functions:

GUICreate() ;Graphical User Interface

GUICtrlCreateCombo() ;Combo field for selection craft type

GUICtrlCreateInput() ;Input field for general inputs

GUICtrlCreateListView() ;Listview to view selected results

For saving and defining data, that really depends on what data, and how you are going to organize it. For the most part, read up on Arrays and File management for saving the data. For using a timer to log flight times, you can utilize TimerInit() to initiate a time stamp and TimerDiff() when the flight ends to calculate the flight time in milleseconds, then write a small algorithm to break the flight time down in to minutes and/or hours or however you wish to store flight time.

I suggest looking around the help file and forums, touching on subjects like data storage, array functions, GUI, and other methods to see what flavors you like best, and working around them. Once you have a some code put together and when/if you hit a wall or error that you are unable to identify, then post a reproducer script of the error/problem along with what your trying to achieve, what results you expect, and what errors/problems you are having, and I am more then certain someone will be happy to help you work the bugs out of your project.

Good Luck & Happy Coding!

Realm

[Sirgijoe]

awesome! thanks, I really do appreciate the recommendations and advice.. i'll look around and see what I can't dig up for it!

i'm sure I will make it real simple to start, and add in stuff as I go 8)..