Question

In my current project, I am going to write a function of calculating average Temperature.

A notatable point of this function is that it receives data from many temperature sources at different time. Could you advise me “How can I write a function with such a behavior?”

For instance, following function receives tempSensorData from many temperature Sensors, which sends temperature data at different time. I need to write a logic of calculating average temperature.

public void calculateRoomAvgTemp(TempStruct tempSensorData) {

   // Write logic of calculating Average Temperature.

}

Answer 1

Why don’t you just keep a running average? Assuming that your method gets called each time a temperature reading is taken, you can do the following:

private final List<Double> temps = Collections
        .synchronizedList(new ArrayList<Double>());
private double currentAverage = 0d;

public void calculateRoomAvgTemp(TempStruct tempSensorData) {
    synchronized (this.temps) {
        this.temps.add(tempSensorData.temp);
        this.currentAverage = 0d;

        for (Double temp : this.temps) {
            this.currentAverage += temp;       
        }

        this.currentAverage /= this.temps.size();
    }
}