Hi @roidesreines, welcome at Hiveeyes! You are absolutely right, it would be great to have HaniMandl with internationalization! We had a discussion about that already in the (German speaking) Facebook Group where HaniMandl “was born”. Or was you the one who initiated the discussion there? :-)
I think it is doable but it is a lot of work, as you mentioned, we have three workpackages:
-
translate UI
This is the most important todo, so that non-German speaking people can interact with HaniMandl
I think there are elaborated i18n (=internationalization) libraries for Arduino we can use. In my first search GitHub - astagi/a18n: i18n with Arduino poped up, they may be more interesting libs. Currently all output is hardcoded, so we have the task to do:
– implement the library
– translate all (German) output to English
– pull all German text out of the code and replace it with placeholder (prefered the English variant)
– put all text (placeholder, English, German) in the JSON code (or other format, depending on the used library)
– expand the JSON to further languages, I may see a vote for French here :-) -
translate code / variables / functions to English
The HaniMandl code is grown over time and the initial code from Marc Vasterling was with German variables and so on, so we stick at this over time … This could be tricky because a wrong character in code can lead to a broken program. But it should be doable with a halt automated search and replace task and decent testing afterwards. -
translate comments in code
There is a lot of documentaion in code – but German atm. -
translate documentation
Translating the doc under HaniMandl, halbautomatischer Honig-Abfüll-Roboter is the easiest part, I think!
Btw. we have a globe icon under every posting here in the board to autotranslate the posting! So this work is nearly done!
Btw I wouldn’t do language selection at compile time because switching to an other language is so not possible. I would do it in code and you can also work with binary files, much more comfortable!
I think @aholzhammer, who did a lot of development work for HaniMandl in the past, did this already but unfortunately he decided to make a commercial product based on the HaniMandl idea and so new code from Andreas in no longer available as open source. So in case you are searching for a fast solution have a look at https://www.der-honigabfueller.de .
The user interface can be switched between several languages (currently German, English, French, Italian, Serbian, Polish, Swedish)
One remark about the choosen board. It may be hard to order, but our intention was to make soldering as less es possible. So an onboard display was a good idea to start with. There is some confusion with the different Heltec versions and we are also limited to this small display. Perhaps the most flexible but still doable Version is a PCB based HaniMandl. Don’t know what you think if ordering a PCB would be an obstakle.
In the current version you have to order only parts at Amazon or on an other shop and you need some soldering skills. Uploading Gerber files to a PCB service and choosing 20 options for PCB productions may be not so easy.
Thank you for your input and as we say in German, du rennst offene Türen damit ein! :-)