Caramble, my app for the Mini

I’ve built an app to use with my Mini, called Caramble. It’s an iPhone app, and it does a few things I wanted for the car.

Recording drives

Every drive is recorded automatically, without me having to touch the phone at all. There’s a small Bluetooth beacon in the car, wired so that it only comes on with the ignition. When the phone picks it up, it starts recording, and when I switch the engine off, the drive ends. Each one is saved with its route on a map, how long it took, and how much of that time I was actually moving.

Fuel and the logbook

When I fill up, I take a photo of the petrol pump and one of the odometer, in either order, and the app reads the figures from them. It logs the fill-up and keeps a running figure for the fuel consumption, which is 36.7 mpg so far. The Mini’s odometer reads 8.2% high, so it corrects for that too.

I can log other things as well, such as services and notes about the car, and each note is linked to the drive it was written on.

Fewer humps

I hate driving over speed humps in the Mini, so the route planner can find a route with as few of them as possible. It uses TfL’s records of the speed humps across Greater London, matched up with the roads, and shows the quickest route next to what it calls the nice way, with the time and the number of humps for each. After each drive it also tells me how many humps I avoided compared with the quickest way, which is 46 so far. Outside London it falls back to an ordinary fastest route.

Getting there

I can also use it to navigate, with turn-by-turn directions that follow the route I picked. Live traffic is taken into account when it plans a route, and if I go off course it picks up the route again further on.

I’m finding the app useful, and I’m refining it every few journeys. It’s a bit like having Strava for cars. I like having a record of where I’ve been.