CarMaint

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The main purpose of CarMaint is to help keep track of all the routine maintenance required for all of your vehicles. CarMaint will let you create as many vehicle entries as you need. For each vehicle you can specify what maintenance items to track and at what intervals (mileage, time, or both) to use.

To track vehicle maintenance based on miles requires periodic entries for the mileage of your vehicles. The easiest and most convenient time to do this is when you fill the vehicle with fuel. This will ensure that CarMaint gets regular updates of your vehicles odometer. Regular updates will give you earlier notice of upcoming maintenance work that needs to be performed.

Optionally, while entering your odometer readings during vehicle fueling, you may also enter information about how much fuel you added for the fill up. By entering this information CarMaint will also track the gas mileage you are getting from your vehicles.

If you elect to also track your gas mileage in CarMaint, you will need to understand the three types of gas fill up entries and how they work. The three entry types are “Full”, “Partial”, and “Reset”. “Full” entries should be created when you completely fill the fuel tank of the vehicle. “Partial Entries” are used when you do not completely fill the fuel tank of the vehicle. (For example: You only added $5 of fuel instead of filling until the pump shut off). “Reset” entries are a special case. If you re-fuel your vehicle and do not add that gas entry into CarMaint, you should create a “Reset” entry the next time you enter a gas entry. Because you skipped entering one or more gas entries CarMaint cannot accurately calculate the gas mileage for the skipped entries. For this reason CarMaint needs to be told to start over on gas mileage calculations starting with this “Reset” gas entry.

When you enter your first “Full” gas entry for a vehicle you will notice that CarMaint does not enter a gas mileage calculation. This is because the gas mileage for each gas entry is calculated based on the information entering in the next gas entry. Once you enter your next “Full” gas entry you will see CarMaint display calculated gas mileage. Similarly, “Partial” gas entries will also not have mileage calculated until the next “Full” gas entry.

As you will see, tracking your car maintenance and (optionally) gas mileage with CarMaint is simple and requires very little time. Below we will describe each of the screens you will find in the CarMaint application and describe how you will use them.

Select Vehicle Panel

(1) Select a vehicle
(2) Add a new vehicle
(3) Edit the selected vehicle
(4) Delete the selected vehicle
(5) Information display for the selected vehicle
(6) Upcoming service display for selected vehicle
This display shows a list of services and when they will be due. It is listed in order of how soon the service will be
necessary. Overdue items will be listed in red.

Create/Edit Vehicle Panel

When creating a new vehicle all the entry fields will be blank. The only required field to create a new vehicle is the “Name” field. All other fields are optional.

When editing a vehicle you can change any entries you want to update.

To commit any changes you have made tap the “Save” button. To discard any changes you have made and close the panel tap the “Cancel” button.

Service Interval Panel

Use this panel to manage what services to track on a vehicle. CarMaint comes with several common vehicle maintenance items with default mileage and month intervals. Maintenance items may have only a mile or month interval, both a mile and month interval, or have no intervals set. Intervals that have neither mileage nor month intervals set will not be tracked for the vehicle. These service intervals are used in conjunction with your periodic gas entries and service performed entries to determine when vehicle maintenance is due. The service interval default values should be updated to match the service intervals found in your vehicle’s user manual.

To edit a service interval, tap the interval in the grid. You will see the grid shift down and display entry fields where you can edit the interval values. Tap the “Update” button to update the service interval values. To cancel your edit just tap the interval in the grid a second time. The grid will shift back up to cover the entry fields.

To create a new service interval tap the “Create a new service” tile in the grid. Enter a name, appropriate values for miles and months, and tap the “Update” button.

Entry List Panel

This panel will display a list of entries for a selected vehicle. There are two types of entries: gas fill up entries and service entries. Above the entry list use the “All”, “Service”, and “Gas” buttons to select what entries you want to view. At the top right are two buttons that can be used to create a new gas entry or a new service entry. Tapping these buttons will open up the Create Gas Entry or Create Service Entry Panel respectively (See “Create/Edit Gas Entry” and “Create/Edit Service Entry” sections for more details). Tapping an entry in the list will open up the appropriate edit entry panel.

Create/Edit Gas Entry Panel

The important required fields on this panel are the date and the odometer. These are the minimum required fields to track service intervals. The rest of the fields are optional.

To track your gas mileage enter any two of these three fields: cost per gallon, number of gallons, cost of gas. CarMaint will automatically calculate and populate the third entry based on your entries for the other two fields.

Optionally you can enter the “Brand” of the fuel, the “Location” of the filling station, the tire pressure of the vehicles tires, and notes about the entry.

If you do not find the entry in the dropdown you would like to use for “Brand”, “Location”, or “Payment Type” you can tap the item in the respective drop down that reads “Create a new entry”. Tapping this item will open the “Settings Panel”. (See the “Settings Panel” section for information on how to manage your settings. ) Once you create the entry you want in the “Settings Panel” you can close the setting panel to return to the “Gas Entry Panel”. Your newly created entry should now be available in the “Brand”, “Location”, or “Payment Type” dropdown.

To commit any changes you have made tap the “Save” button. To discard any changes you have made and close the panel tap the “Cancel” button. If you are editing an existing entry a “Delete” button will be available. To delete this entry tap the “Delete” button.

Create/Edit Service Entry Panel

The important required fields on this panel are the date, the odometer, and the service type that was performed on the vehicle. These are the minimum required fields to track service intervals.

Optionally you can enter the “Location” of the service, the tire pressure of the vehicles tires, and notes about the entry.

If you do not find the entry in the dropdown you would like to use for “Service Types”, “Location”, or “Payment Type” you can tap the item in the respective drop down that reads “Create a new entry”. Tapping this item will open the “Settings Panel”. (See the “Settings Panel” section for information on how to manage your settings.) Once you create the entry you want in the “Settings Panel” you can close the setting panel to return to the “Gas Entry Panel”. Your newly created entry should now be available in the “Brand”, “Location”, or “Payment Type” dropdown.

Settings Panel

This panel is used to manage the items available in the “Service Type”, “Brand”, “Location”, and “Payment Type” dropdowns. On this panel you will be able to create, edit, and delete the items available in these dropdowns.

The settings panel can be accessed in two ways.

The first way is to swipe down from the top bezel area of your playbook (top area above the screen). This will pull down a menu. Tap the “Settings” menu item to access the settings panel. Alteratively, in any of the “Service Type”, “Brand”, “Location”, and “Payment Type” dropdowns tap the entry "Create new entry..." to open the settings panel.

To create a new item for one of the dropdowns tap the list entry labeled “Create a new entry”. The list will shift down to reveal an entry field and an “Update” button. Enter the name for the new item and tap the “Update” button to add the new item. To cancel the new item tap the “Create a new entry” item again instead of tapping the “Update” button.

To edit an existing item for one of the dropdowns tap the list entry for that item. The list will shift down to reveal an entry field with the name of the item you tapped and an “Update” button. Change the name of the item and tap the “Update” button to change the name of the item. To cancel the edit of the item tap the list entry for the item again instead of tapping the “Update” button.

Main Menu

The CarMaint menu can be accessed by swiping down from the top bezel area of your playbook (top area of the screen). This will pull down a menu with the following items: “Settings”, "Data", "Help", and “About”. Tapping “Settings” will open the “Settings Panel” (See “Settings Panel” section for more details.) Tapping “Data” will open the “Data Management Panel” (See “Data Management Panel” section for more details.) Tapping “Help” will open this webpage in the browser. Tapping “About” will open an about screen that will give you information on the version of CarMaint you are running.

Data Management Panel

This panel is used to manage your CarMaint data. From this panel you can export your CarMaint data to CSV(comma separated values) files. You can also import these exported CSV files back into CarMaint.

The Export CSV section allows for choosing to export "All" vehicles or choosing to export a specific vehicle using the dropdown. Next select a directory for CarMaint to write the CSV files. The default export directory is the CarMaint application storage directory. Tapping the "Export CSV" button will write two files to the specified directory: "carmaintVehicleData.csv" and "carmaintEntryData.csv". The Vehicle data CSV file contains the information entered in the "Create/Edit Vehicle Panel" (name, VIN, etc) for each exported vehicle. The Entry Data contains all of the gas and service entries for each exported vehicle.

The Import CSV section is used to import CSV files that were previously exported from CarMaint. The intention of the feature is to help recover from data loss or to move data to a new device. This feature is intended to import data into a fresh CarMaint install that has no data. While this feature will import data into a CarMaint install that has existing data it could possibly overwrite existing data. Use caution if trying to import to a CarMaint install with existing data.

The Import CSV feature is intended to import the two CSV files from a previous CarMaint export. In the Import CSV section select the vehicle data CSV file location and the entry data CSV file location. Tap the "Import" button to import the selected CSV file data.

NOTE: Import can be potentially destructive to any existing data. If attempting to import over existing data it would be prudent to create a backup copy of the "vehicles.db" file in the CarMaint application storage directory in case any data problems are encountered. This file is the database used by CarMaint to store all of its data.