virtual scale
By
@anchith
- 6 Devlogs
- 19 Total hours
A simple Java tool for visualising real world measurements on your screen.
Ship #1
Pending review
virtual-scale
I made a simple Java tool for visualizing real world measurements on your screen.
In the project, you can draw lines and view their real world measurements in various units.
You can also import images, and then define a known measurement to accurately measure other parts of the image.
The project has a ScaleLibrary tool in the backend, that has all the conversion and measurement tools. Creating this was an interesting but also challenging experience and I got to learn about displays, DPI, and more.
I made the entire project in Java, with no external dependencies or libraries.
53m 49s logged
7h 25m 15s logged
GUIs and other stuff
The main thing that I did in these 7 hours 
was making a graphical interface for the app.
I first designed the UI in the Netbeans Form Editor because it’s really easy to make it in there, then I exported all the code generated by that and then spent a lot of time wiring everything up and making the GUI stuff actually do something.
It has a bunch of new features and settings like:
- Snapping
- Line colour
- Units
- Zoom
- Image stuff
which took very long to implement because it needed a lot of backend stuff 
I also briefly overwrote a bunch of code and accidentally deleted the source folder 
but I managed to retrieve everything from the recycle bin 
I then made another GUI for the initialization screen - where you choose the calibration method (manual or reported) in a similar way.
Did a lot of backend work as well, like changing how the image system calibrates stuff.
Also I made a nice readme and I’m going to ship soon! 
2h 29m 32s logged
more improvements
I added a file selection screen to choose which image to view.
There is also a nice grid background now which took way too long
woa you can put emojis now? 
I also made a bunch of other small QoL improvements too, and this is how it looks now!
(not much of a visual difference compared to before 
)
4h 58m 39s logged
Image measurement!
I implemented another system where you can import an image, then draw a line and say how long that line is. Then the whole image stuff will be scaled proportional to that and then you can measure it and stuff!
I also added a bunch of other small things like improving the scale library backend, adding camera controls, etc.
It’s kind of barebones rn and this took way too long anyway, I’m going to add some menus/interfaces to tie everything together and some other QoL next ig.
Here’s a picture of a maze where I selected the big horizontal line and defined it as 170mm, and there’s some measurements on it.
1h 54m 32s logged
1h 38m 11s logged
virtual-scale
I’m making a virtual scale! When modelling or designing stuff, it’s very easy to lose a sense of how big a measurement actually is. I constantly find myself grabbing a ruler just to visualize a distance. So I’m making a little virtual ruler that displays real-world measurements directly on your screen. It uses your screen’s dots-per-inch count (basically how many pixels are in an inch of the screen) to show accurate distances.
Today, I worked on the actual scale library/backend of the app and worked on the scale calibration, unit conversion and scale systems.
