Monthly Archives: January 2012

Technology

The Fix For My AR-VS7 Fujitsu Air Conditioner Remote

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It is stinking hot. I’ve been able to cope fairly easily up till now but not today. I even jumped in the pool about 10 minutes before bed. According to the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) it is 32 degrees Celsius outside at almost 11 pm at night. For a bigger number that is apparently almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Nice and toasty. Now I know 30 Celsius is my limit.

Some how I scored the master bedroom in our house with the his and hers bathroom with his and hers mirrors and his and hers shower. Plus I got an air conditioner. I’m the only room in the house to have one. Everyone else in the house would have been using it religiously for the last few weeks but I actually love the heat so tonight was the first time that I’ve turned it on.

One issue: The remote didn’t work.

I don’t know who designs an electrical appliance without a manual keyboard but the answer I now know is Fujitsu. Thanks Mark Taylor.

Luckily there is a fix which I figure out from the help of a few blogs which weren’t exactly clear. This works for a AR-VS7M remote at least. I believe there are other version of the AR-VS7 air conditioner so check which remote type you have.

  1. Take out the old batteries and find some new ones
  2. Find a pen or tooth pick or similar implement and hold down the ACL button inside the little hole under the battery cover.
  3. Put new batteries in
  4. Turn it on and frig around with it till it works for me.

Worked a charm for me and hopefully it works for you too!

Technology

Errors and Issues Found While Adding AdMob for Android

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On my to do list for a while was to add advertisements to my application, CountView. I’m not really interested in making a profit in any way but I wanted to see how hard it was to do and if you could expect any kind of profit at all. If I’m ever going to make a career of this app and custom development career then it’s best to
start small and work up from there.

Given how common ad platforms are I was expecting that adding them to my app was going to be very straight forward. And in some ways it was. The first choice was between AdSense and AdMob, both provided by Google. Google makes it quite clear that they believe AdMob is the platform of choice for Android apps and apps in general. There’s definitely nothing stopping you using AdSense and importing it into a web container but I have to agree that the concept behind AdMob makes sense.

AdMob recently released a new version 4.3.1 that I think came out in October 2011. My first issue was that you needed at least Android 3.2 (the tablet version) to compile it against and for some reason that refused to deploy to my Nexus One running 2.3.3 even though it was supposed to be backward compatible to Android 1.5. I got round most of this by installing the Ice Cream Sandwich Emulator which seemed a lot better than the earlier versions that I had use previously. The even better fix for this was that I bought a Galaxy Nexus. All problems solved!

Then the real problems started. I deployed it and the ad just refused to show. No errors. It said that an ad was being received and then nothing. Added some house ads and still nothing. Added my device multiple ways as a test device and still no luck. Had me stumped for ages. Eventually I found the following errors:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{com.fozziewossie.android/com.fozziewossie.android.CountViewActivity}: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.google.ads.AdView cannot be cast to android.widget.TextView
…
Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.google.ads.AdView cannot be cast to android.widget.TextView

And I was like, what the? All I was doing at that line was:

TextView countTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.CountField);

That made no sense at all to me. I did some extensive Googling and none of it seemed to help. Eventually I just did my standard response when things refused to work and just fecked around.

My solution. Wrap the com.google.ads.AdView component in the XML in a Linear Layout and move it to the top of the application. Why that fixes it I have no idea. I’m results driven, it works!

The new version of CountView is being released tonight and includes one other change to have the background colour default to black with white text. It’s much more sophisticated.