BlueChilli ABA File Generator

Elegant software should all be about reducing the time taken to do tasks. I firmly believe that if doing something online or the electronic way takes longer than what it did before – then you shouldn’t be doing it!

One area which can save people heaps of time is when processing bank transactions.

We’ve all been there, sitting in front of our online bank portal typing in entry after entry to pay suppliers, contractors and staff.  But fear not – there is a way to automate this process and make life easier for yourself!

Most Australian banks accept what is called a “Cemtext ABA file” which is a semi-standard issued by the Australian Bankers Association.  Many popular accounting software packages such as MYOB and Quicken can automatically export an ABA file which can be then imported into your bank portal.

But what if you’re running your own financial software?

If you’re running your own custom finance or payroll software you can develop your own aba file generator script which conforms to the ABA file specification.  Alternatively (and this is the plug!) contact my company Blue Chilli Technology and we can develop a solution for you.

To keep things open, we’ve published the full spec of the ABA file format online for you to develop your own functions.  We’ve even built a free ABA file generator which you can trial online.  The files the generator produces have been tested with the major banks and you can use it to upload batch transactions or to validate your own functions.

A recent client claims they will have an ROI of just a few months after commissioning a custom ABA file generator – what used to take their staff hours can now be accomplished in under 30 seconds – which is really making their life easier.

I’ve done quite a few tradeshows and have been fortunate to be involved in big-budget events where upwards of $500k is spent per stall on the event all the way down to smaller local marketplace events with budgets less than $10k.  From these events I’ve picked up many tricks to make tradeshows successful.

This blog isn’t about those tricks (I’ll save that one for later!), but rather, it is about the very important technique of capturing the lessons learned, in a document commonly referred to as a post activity report.

Crystal Display at AREC 2009

Post Activity Reports

How many times have you remembered you picked up a good tip from an event you went too, but couldn’t remember what the tip was?  Frustrating isn’t it!  A post activity report is designed to remove that problem by documenting relevant lessons leaned tips and your methodology so they can be reproduced or avoided at a later date.

If you’re familiar with the six sigma process, post activity reports assist you with the measurement, analysis and improvement of your activity for future use.

I’m currently evaluating what we will be doing at our next tradeshow for one of my businesses.  A big enabler in making these decisions is that I’ve written a detailed post activity report from each time we’ve done a trade show.  This process ensures we can continue to improve and make the most of our time and efforts – and ultimately results in more sales.

The report

A post activity report can be in any format you wish and should be completed as close as possible to the activity so your mind is still buzzing with ideas.  I have a set format I follow, inspired by the military writing style as it encourages structure and brevity.  It contains seven topics:

• Introduction.  Introduce the report and the activity, remember that someone else may be reading your report in the future who isn’t familiar with why the report has been written.
• Background.  This is where you would explain why you’re doing the activity, what you want to achieve from it, and any lessons you’re using from previous post activity reports.  This last bit helps you evaluate things that continue to work.
• Preparation.  In the preparation section, write about the lead up to the activity.  Keeping brief, put as much detail as possible, including contact details of people you worked with.  Attach quotes and emails as annexes to the document so they don’t break the flow.
• Conduct.  Here is where you would write about how you conducted the actual activity.  For a tradeshow it could be a narrative of the days events.
• Post conduct.  Post conduct is just as important as the conduct itself.  Write how long it took you to contact all your new leads and the response you got.
• Budget.  Include a mini budget of the event.  This will help with future budget estimates.  Also include an calculation of the cost per lead (total cost divided by number of leads) and the cost per sale (total cost divided by number of sales).  These metrics are powerful to evaluate the success of the activity.
• Summary.  Take out the 3 or 4 key messages, the things you must absolutely do and avoid next time and put these in the summary.

These topics take you through all the phases of the activity, from planning, to the conduct to the follow ups.  The idea is that under each of these topics you write one or more paragraphs expanding on the topic.  You would be amazed at what you think is important later that might not seem relevant today.

I wrote a post activity report for a military exercise and tried to include as much information as possible.  At the insistence of my boss I included a section on the public perception of the exercise – I didn’t think it relevant to the report.  Good thing I did, as several months later I was asked to manage a PR campaign and was able to pull many of the lessons learned from the report.

In summary post activity reports are a great way to capture your ideas.  I’ve attached a blank activity report in word format for you to begin using, let me know how you go!

Dummy Post Activity Report

Unfortunately I couldn’t do exactly what I wanted with the sensor, but the offshoot was that I was able to create a neat little distance sensor and alarm -- the kind you find in the back of cars to prevent you from banging into something.  Although it won’t be used for my project, I thought it a good idea to write it up to hopefully inspire others thinking of getting involved in digital electronics.

I will preface this blog by saying it’s going to get rather geeky, so if you have a penchant for up-turned collars then this one isn’t for you.

Shopping List

The bits you’ll need for this tutorial are:

• Arduino micro controller
• Sharp GP2yOA IR sensor and cables
• 16x2 LCD Screen
• Piezoelectric buzzer
• Some wire

All up you’re looking at around $70AUD.

I’m using the open source Arduino micro-controller because they’re readily available, cheap and because they’re open source, there is a huge community of people using them.  That said, any microcontroller could be used, but you’ll have to adjust the source code accordingly.

Wire it up.

The first thing to do is connect your bits together.  If you’ve never used an Arduino before, I suggest having a go at the Arduino basic tutorials first so you can get the hang of it.

Connect up the Sharp IR Sensor to your Arduino, connect the sensor GND (black) to Arduino GND, VCC (red) to +5V and Vo (yellow) to Analog input pin 0.

Connect the LCD screen following the diagram over at Arduino.cc and finally, connect the buzzer with the red lead to digital output pin 6 and black lead to GND.

You should have something that looks like the image below.

Parking Distance Sensor and Alarm

The Sharp IR sensor

Sharp IR Sensors are very popular with robotics and electronics enthusiasts because they’re simple to use. There are quite a few sensors available to choose from with different range characteristics, so pick one based on your application.  Acroname Robotics has a great article on the Sharp IR sensor including a handy chart to work out which one to use.  I picked the GP2Y0A2YK sensor which has the attached Datasheet.

Unfortunately, sharp sensors are inherently noisy. There’s a good discussion about hardware ways to combat this noise by adding a Low Pass RC filter over at the society of robots, but we’re going to simply average out the errors in code.

Calibration

To calibrate the sensor, hook everything up and download the Arduino sketch AnalogInSerial which came bundled with your Arduino installer.  This simply prints the raw reading from the Analog pin direct to the serial port.  Now position your sensor at one end of a table, slightly raised (on a matchbox for example) and take analog readings every 2cm from 0 to 2m and plug them into excel and plot a graph.  You should get something like this:

Distance vs Measured Voltage

This is great, but the problem is arduinos don’t like floating point maths and therefore working with powers is a bit messy.  We need to work out a linear relationship which will work with integer maths.  Acroname robotics has a great article on how to do this.  The values I calculated were:

m' = 16667
b' = 15
k = 10


Putting it together

Now that we have a calibrated Sharp Sensor we can go about building the User Experience.  Like with a software project, a hardware project user interface is vital to ensuring it’s usability.  I only have 32 characters to play with on my LCD screen so I decided to use the first row to display the distance in cm, and the second row to be a visual bar graph of the distance.  Below I’ve attached my full source code for you to use:

DistanceSensor Arduino Code

Conclusion

This project is a great way to start playing with the Arduino sensor and goes to show that inspiration for projects can come from anywhere.