Got fed up with the notebook and a pile of spreadsheets, so I wrote my own reloading log

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spectrality

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Long time reader. I have been handloading about a year now, mostly 6.5 creedmoor, now getting into 6GT as well and my record keeping was a chore. Load data in excel, velocities left in the chrono app, targets in my camera roll, component costs in a spreadsheet I updated maybe twice a year. Any time I wanted to know whether a change had actually done anything I was flipping between four things and doing arithmetic on the back of an envelope.

I write software for a living, so instead of complaining about it for another season I started building the thing I wanted. It is called LoadNode. It went up
on Google Play recently and the iPhone and iPad version is with Apple now.

Roughly what it does:
  • Firearms and barrels with round counts, so you can see where a barrel actually sits rather than guessing
  • Recipes with versions, and load jobs that record what you actually made
  • Chronograph records with SD and ES. It pulls from a Garmin Xero over Bluetooth, so no transcribing strings by hand
  • Group size measured from a photo of the target, in MOA or MIL, inches or cm
  • Component inventory and cost per round
  • A load book PDF of the whole thing if you want it on paper
  • Works offline. That one was non negotiable, most of where I shoot has no signal
Two things it deliberately does not do. It does not give load data: no charge weights, no recipes, no "try this". It only reports your own numbers back to you.
And it will not crown a winner off three shots. Where two charges overlap inside the uncertainty of the sample it says so plainly, and tells you roughly how many
more rounds it would take to actually separate them. I had a node feature early on and pulled it once I worked through the math, because at three or five rounds
a group most of what looks like a node is small sample noise.

The honest reason I built it is that I wanted something I would actually enjoy opening. Most tools in this space feel like paperwork, and a reloading log ought to be the part of the hobby where the picture comes together, not a chore you do afterwards out of duty. I got that far for myself, and now I would like other people to get the same thing out of it.

So please do comment. If something is missing, or awkward, or a number looks wrong to you, say so and I will look at it. Feature suggestions are genuinely welcome too, and I will gladly consider anything that fits: a fair bit of what is in the current version is there because somebody told me my first attempt was wrong.

Development is active and ongoing rather than launch and forget, so a good idea has a real chance of turning up in a build. I wrote the thing, so ask me anything about how any of it is calculated.

Not posting a link, since that is against the rules here. It is under LoadNode on the Play Store.

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leveractionjunkie said:
Looks amazing Spectrality! Will have to check it out at the App Store.

If it’s as useable and functional as it appears from the screenshots it should be a game changer for a lot us.
Click to expand...
The screenshots are of a real app, same ones that are on the actual app listing page in both app stores :) . I would love and appreciate all the feedback and as i have mentioned, all feedback is good feedback, it will allow me to make it a useful and easy to use tool for everyone from beginners to experienced reloaders.
 
I've written many apps and I sort of have a rule of not charging for firearm related ones. But that's just me.
If I was forced to due to unforseen server costs or having a massive overhead for whatever reason I would charge the barest of minimum or just have admob on there.
If I coded yours I would make it free for as long as I could. Then after it get established and all the quirks are ironed out, only then would I bring out a paid model with extra features.

Personally I found it really hard to monetise apps when they have a really small user base. Getting everyone hyped over a killer app and getting known is hard with "Pro" features behind a paywall.

One other thing I would do is revamp the GUI so it doesn't look vibe coded. A keen eye can spot the style AI code slaps on there. Funny thing is, there are worker skills that can un-slop your GUI to make it look more "natural" lol.

Just my honest opinion. Looks good though! (y)
 
Karnage said:
I've written many apps and I sort of have a rule of not charging for firearm related ones. But that's just me.
If I was forced to due to unforseen server costs or having a massive overhead for whatever reason I would charge the barest of minimum or just have admob on there.
If I coded yours I would make it free for as long as I could. Then after it get established and all the quirks are ironed out, only then would I bring out a paid model with extra features.

Personally I found it really hard to monetise apps when they have a really small user base. Getting everyone hyped over a killer app and getting known is hard with "Pro" features behind a paywall.

One other thing I would do is revamp the GUI so it doesn't look vibe coded. A keen eye can spot the style AI code slaps on there. Funny thing is, there are worker skills that can un-slop your GUI to make it look more "natural" lol.

Just my honest opinion. Looks good though! (y)
Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to write that out, it is a fair set of points and
worth answering properly.

On the GUI: you are right that I am not a designer, and I am not going to
pretend otherwise. What I aimed at is something usable with cold hands at a
bench, or on a range in bad light. Big targets, few taps, nothing important
hidden behind a gesture, numbers you can read at a glance. That is a different
goal from looking impressive in a screenshot, and where the two pulled against
each other I went with the first. If there is a specific screen that reads badly
to you, I would much rather have that than a general impression. Tell me which
one and I will fix it.

On the code: my background is real-time high-availability embedded systems. This
is written the way I would write firmware for a fuel management system, where an
unhandled state is not a bug report, it is a failure. That is why the
unglamorous parts got the attention they did, the offline behaviour and the data
layer in particular.

On ads: there will never be any, and there will never be a subscription either.
That is a personal position rather than a business one. I cannot stand either as
a user, and I am not going to ship something I would delete off my own phone.
Past the matter of taste, an ad SDK means a third party sitting inside an app
that holds your load records, and selling the data is the same answer twice.
Paying for it once is what lets there be neither.

The one part with a genuine running cost is the AI analysis, because each one
costs me money the moment somebody runs it. That is why those are credits rather
than unlimited. Nothing else in the app has a meter on it.
I will leave the actual pricing alone in here, since that starts to look like
advertising and the rules are the rules. It is on the store listing for anyone
curious.

On the risk of buying something unproven: both stores take refund requests. Use
it properly for an evening, and if it is not for you, ask for your money back. I
would rather that than talk anybody into it.

Thanks again for the read, and for the honest take. I much appreciate it.
 
Great app with lot of info to fill. I am very interested to finally replace my paper notes and books.
How hard would it be to extract the speeds in auto read from Labradar v1 app?
I already feel that this your app is a great addition to my Strelok Pro.
All data in a single droid tablet, huh :)
 
bigHUN said:
Great app with lot of info to fill. I am very interested to finally replace my paper notes and books.
How hard would it be to extract the speeds in auto read from Labradar v1 app?
I already feel that this your app is a great addition to my Strelok Pro.
All data in a single droid tablet, huh :)
Click to expand...
Thanks, that is good to hear. Replacing the paper notebook is exactly the itch I was scratching when I started this.

LabRadar and Athlon chronograph support is the request I get most so far :). Short answer: I would genuinely like to do both. The honest blocker is that I do not own either one.

The Garmin support exists for a simple reason. I bought a C1, then later a C2, with my own money, and I could sit there with the unit in front of me and work at it until the link was solid. I now own two chronographs and no longer have a good excuse to own both except to chase any bug reports that can come up, but none were reported so far. You cannot build that kind of thing blind. It needs the actual hardware on the bench to develop against and, more importantly, to test against before I would put it in front of anyone.

So if I can get my hands on a LabRadar or an Athlon, I will take a run at it. That could be buying one once the app supports itself well enough to pay for it, or someone lending me a unit for a couple of weeks, or a used one turning up at the right price. I am not going to promise a date on something I cannot start yet.

In the meantime there is a smaller version of this that does not need the hardware. The LabRadar writes its series data to the SD card, and importing those files would get your velocities into a session without retyping them. That I can build against sample files. If you are willing to send a couple of real exports from your unit, that helps more than anything else, because I would rather work from your actual files than from a format I guessed at.

Same offer to anyone reading with a chronograph I do not support yet. The chronograph side is built to take more than one source, so adding another is mostly a matter of knowing the format and having something real to test on.

And yes, ballistics in one app and load development in another on the same tablet is roughly how I run it myself. No interest in rebuilding what Strelok already does well.
 
I got my orage Labradar v1 second hand last summer for pretty affordable piece price. I was lucky the previous owner wasn't really technically inclined how to setup and tune things and just gave up on this radar unit.
This where my learning curve started, a lot of emails to a tech support group untill finally they released a android version app that is now working well.
I have only last year data.
Developed some load for my W308 that is working pretty well @ 200 and 300 meters, and no need lately to drag an extra equipment to a bench. All just simple repeating since last summer.
I may go powder ladder testing again, I designed a bullet inline press - press force meter, and wanna see if I can sort the new reload by digits,,,,easy effort pressing, medium or heavier effort pressing the bullet. I would expect the differences shall show at the POI group sizes.
This what I would like to prove to myself.
So, yes, I can still extract the last year data directly from the Labradar, also I will figure the way somehow to extract from the droid app. Btw, the droid app GUI is decent now.
I will get back to you with this offer ones I have something in my hands.
 
bigHUN said:
I got my orage Labradar v1 second hand last summer for pretty affordable piece price. I was lucky the previous owner wasn't really technically inclined how to setup and tune things and just gave up on this radar unit.
This where my learning curve started, a lot of emails to a tech support group untill finally they released a android version app that is now working well.
I have only last year data.
Developed some load for my W308 that is working pretty well @ 200 and 300 meters, and no need lately to drag an extra equipment to a bench. All just simple repeating since last summer.
I may go powder ladder testing again, I designed a bullet inline press - press force meter, and wanna see if I can sort the new reload by digits,,,,easy effort pressing, medium or heavier effort pressing the bullet. I would expect the differences shall show at the POI group sizes.
This what I would like to prove to myself.
So, yes, I can still extract the last year data directly from the Labradar, also I will figure the way somehow to extract from the droid app. Btw, the droid app GUI is decent now.
I will get back to you with this offer ones I have something in my hands.
Click to expand...
That is a good way to end up with one. Half the used radars out there were sold by someone who never got past the setup.

No rush at all on the files. Whenever you have something in hand is fine, and last year's data is perfect for this. What helps most is the raw files straight off the SD card, unmodified, including a couple of series with a few shots each. If the Android app has its own export, a sample of that too, since the two formats are probably not identical and I would rather support both than guess which one people actually use. Do not clean anything up. The odd malformed row or aborted series is the useful part, because that is what breaks an importer written against a tidy example.

Your seating force idea is interesting, and it is close to what I built the analysis side for. Recording it is easy enough, you can note the effort bucket against each group and then compare them. The part I would flag honestly, because the app tries to be honest about it rather than flattering: sorting into easy, medium and heavy and shooting a few groups of each will very likely not separate them. Group size is a noisy measurement, and three buckets of five shots is not much to reason from. Not a reason to skip it, just a reason to plan for more rounds per bucket than feels necessary, and to be ready for the honest answer to be "cannot tell yet".

That is actually why the composite analysis exists in the app. It pools groups so you can get to a 20 to 50 shot picture per condition instead of drawing conclusions from a single five shot target. If you do run it, that is the tool I would point you at, and the app will tell you when the spread it is showing you is not backed by enough shots to mean anything.

If you do get to the point of tagging rounds by seating effort and it turns out the app makes that awkward, tell me please. That is the sort of thing I would rather hear about than have someone quietly work around.
 
Btw, I have noticed in couple of your screenshots you mentioned "Sharon".
Should that point to Sharon Gun Club? I don't see in your signature where is your location.
 
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