Maintenance On The Web

Welcome to the Maintenance Program on the Web! Here you can find a web-based tool which can help you on doing maintenance on your car, motorcycle or anything else needing maintenance.

This program can remind you when it is time to change oil, filters, spark plugs or to check coolant. Operations can be scheduled by time, by mileage or both. You define what is the maintenance program of your vehicle, then you tell the program how many kilometers (or miles) you have covered and the actual date. The program displays a list of maintenance operations that are required: the urgency of each operation is represented with colors and graphics.

The program is hosted on an internet web server, so you can use it wherever you want. All you need is a browser with support for cookies enabled. The program is multiuser and multivehicle. This means that a single server can serve multiple users managing maintenance. Users are required to enter a login and a password. Each user, since logged in, can manage maintenance for several vehicles.

Have the Program Running on the Web Server

First of all you must have the program installed and running on a web server. You can install it on your own, downloading the package and following the README. See below for download tips.

At the URL http://www.rigacci.org/rec/moto/maintenance/ you can find my personal installation. If you want to use my installation for your convenience, you can apply for an account. Write a mail to me: [email protected], I will give you an username and a password, so you can use the system to insert your data. Feedback to improve the program will be greately apreciated.

I will do my best effort to guarantee the quality and the correctness of the service, but as with free software, the service is offered "as is" and you will use it entirely at your own risk.

On my personal installation, you can also log in as the user test with password test. In this way you have access to a test database where you can play around. But remember that any changes you make, will be overwritten with the defaults once a day.

How to Use the Program

I hope the program is quite intuitive. The first time you log in, you have to enter a new vehicle model. Then you have to enter a new vehicle of that model (you can have several vehicles of the same make and model). For each model you have created, you must specify the maintenance program schedule. Use the Edit program from the menu and refer to the next section in this page.

Once you have accomplished this initial setup, you can proceed with Vehicle select. Next, in the Vehicle data page, you update the mileage and the actual date; in this way the program can calculate the emergency level of each maintenance operation. In the Maintenance page you will see items needing maintenance marked with a red dot.

You can click over each item to open a page where you record the maintenance operation you make, so that an history can be built. Also the Full history of vehicle maintenance is available from the menu.

IMPORTANT
Remember always to express dates in ISO format: YYYY-MM-DD

How to Specify the Maintenance Program

Before actually doing maintenance, you have to enter the maintenance program of your vehicle. This is done from the Edit program voice of the menu on the left. You should become familiar with some terms here used:

Vehicle: You must give a name to each vehicle on which you want to do maintenance. You have also to specify a start date, from which each schedule is calculated. This is generally the date on which the vehicle starts keeping service.
Model: Each vehicle is of a particular make and model. You must give a name to the model. This is important: the maintenance program is defined upon the model, not upon the vehicle. In this way you can have several vehicle of the same model, and have the maintenance program specified only once.
Item: For each model (not vehicle!) you entered, you list several items needing maintenance. Examples of item are engine oil, tyres, coolant, spark plugs.
Operation: Each item may need several maintenance operations. For example the item spark plugs may need check and replace at different schedule. Each operation is defined by a name (e.g. replace), a mileage interval (kilometers or miles) and an interval in days.

Download the Sources

The Maintenance program was developed by Niccolo Rigacci and it is released under the GPL policy. The sources are written in PHP. In order to run them you will need:

An Apache Web server with the
PHP4 language, and the
PostgreSQL database

Here are the available versions: