When I seriously started planning for my backyard retaining wall, I found the delivery cost for stone blocks is $75.00 a drop. At that price, I had better get it right the first time so I started searching on line for answers.
There are a lot of websites, like WikiHow.com and answers.com where users can share their expertise with others. And thanks to them, they enabled me to order the right amount of blocks (just one transportation charge).
While these web sites’ information were helpful, I did struggled through some of their instructions; nay that can’t be right I thought, and had to cross reference several articles about the subject to get to the right calculations…All the while thinking pity “they don’t just give me a calculator”.
After having down my computations resulting from a mixed sets of instructions sourced from different articles, my next move (why didn’t I think of it before?) was to Google search for a retaining wall calculator. I wanted a second opinion to insure I got it right or at least was ballpark.
No luck, the search results were nothing but loose instructions, others were calculators but required I send the data to some contractors – I did not pursue these any further, others worked only for specific block types and their assumptions, if any, were not explained.
That’s when I stumbled upon OnGoBee were users can build calculators. Hum m, do I need to be scientist or have special skills? Since I had my retaining wall formulas and results down on paper I thought I’d give it a try.
I started from their Calculator template picking a simple one which demonstrates how to multiply 2 numbers and show the result. My first attempt took me a little over an hour. To be fair, I started with my retaining wall problem which is somewhat complex and spend too much time deciding if I should automatically consider a certain percentage of the wall being below ground for stability or is it evident to a user and he/she will tell me?
I finally decided that a user is likely to tell me the height from the ground up so I automatically figured out the amount of stone required below ground and just tell him/her that assumption. After tweaking a few calculations and sentences, I was happy with the results and now have the satisfaction that others can use it as well.
OK, now that I had experienced it, figured out a few things and really liked the results, I wondered how long building a second calculator would take? I decided to try it again with a simpler problem, a split the bill calculator. Surprisingly, it only took me 10 minutes from start to publish! I somewhat cheated though. I figured out that I could make a copy of my first calculator and use it as a base start for the next one, that really speeded things up.
Here are a few concepts that helped me to figure things out.
- Somewhat obvious, OnGoBee has a help page that describes how to create calculators. Well, I could have shaved 10 minutes on my first attempt had I known to follow their Help link.
- The most important concept is that you use one page to gather a user desired measurements and a second page to write the formulas and display the result(s).
- A button called “Calculate” and located on the first page simply points to the folder where the second page is located. Oh yes, the first and the second page need to be in a different folder.
- For every number that you need to gather from a user or that you need to calculate, you’ll need to define a Data Bucket (give it a name, ‘none’ for display and ‘number’ for type).
- Once you created that data bucket, you can use it on a page with a data entry field called a slider or a spinner. You can also put it inside a formula or anywhere in the page text.
- As long as that data bucket name is within bracket, the tool converts it to the right value. For example, if I call a data bucket ‘Height’ and another data bucket ‘Lenght’, than in my text I can write “This wall is {Length} feet long” or in a formula, I can write {Length} * {Height} to calculate the area.
That’s pretty much all the concepts needed to build a calculator.
I noticed different calculators where plain English answers (in the form of radio buttons) are used in the calculations. Don’t know how to do this yet but am definitely going there next as I’m thinking to build a “How long will we live” calculator (yes, getting ambitious).
Bottom line, pretty cool that any user can build a totally free form calculator about pretty much anything. That makes me wonder what will come out of it next.
Peek of my effort so far:
Block retaining wall calculator
Gravel calculator for retaining wall