Martin Matysiak

The self-adjusting solar cell is a device that follows the sun automatically. By that it is able to gain a high amount of energy throughout the day. With this construction I have won the first prize in the "Stawag Solarfreaks" competiton 2008.

My first complex project in the field of micro-controller and electornics was the construction of a GPS logging device. I started the project in 2008 on occasion of a competition on mikrocontroller.net (embdev.net). The device is capable of storing a path that you drive or walk onto a SD memory card. By that, you can easily view the path on you personal computer afterwards.

News: I'm really glad to announce that my article on how to build the device has been published in the 9th issue of the embedded projects journal.

Life is a very complex thing. In january 2009, I've decided to make it at least a little bit easier by simplifying the process of opening the garage door. Instead of "running to the gate lock, inserting the key, turning the key, removing the key, running to the car" this whole process can now be done with just one button press from inside the car.

Recently - as I bought a Google Nexus S some time ago - I started taking a look into development of applications for the Android platform. After some experiments with the general hardware features like the accelerometer and others, I have implemented a class that may be useful for others, too.

One thing I like on the Nexus is the "Car Home" app made by Google. While driving, it provides you a very simple interface with large buttons in order to trigger different actions. Although you can create shortcuts with it, I thought it might be even better if you could have this launcher menu in the app itself that your are developing.

In combination to my SimpleMarker class I have made an engine for clustering those markers if many of them are in a similar location. However, before you use this engine in your application, please note the following: there are probably much better classes for managing high counts of markers, e.g. the MarkerManager class from the Google Maps Utility Library. My SimpleMarker class is also compatible to this MarkerManager, if you want to combine lightweight markers with managing classes.

You still might want to take a look on my code if you want to learn how clustering can be done, as I tried to design the code as understandable as possible. This is why I wrote this article, so keep on reading and see how it works ;-).