Problem and Motivation
I wanted to start tracking my gas mileage and also crowbar NFC tags into the situation because I thought that they were kind of cool.
Solution
The solution I came up with was to create a google form I'd visit on my
phone whenever I filled up my truck at a gas station. The form asks for
my current odometer reading and number of gallons of gas required to
fill the tank to full. In order to get to the form I'd tap my phone
against an NFC tag.
Google Form
Creating the google form was simple enough. The form only asks for my odometer reading and the number of gallons of gas to complete the fill-up. This data is then added to a spreadsheet within google docs. The spreadsheet uses a simple formula to calculate the gas mileage automatically. Because each entry is timestamped, I can track my gas mileage over time.
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| The google form for entering odometer and fuel data |
NFC Tags
In order to save me the effort of typing in the URL to my google form into my phone each time and to make use of NFC tags I encoded the URL to my blog on an NFC tag and then stuck the tag to my dashboard. By simply tapping my phone on the tag I can launch a browser to the google form.
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| NFC tag adhered to the right side of my dashboard |
I purchased several NTAG 215 NFC tags from Amazon, downloaded the NFC Tools app, and wrote the URL of the google form to the tag. The process was remarkably simple.
