Book Image

Android Sensor Programming By Example

By : Varun Nagpal
Book Image

Android Sensor Programming By Example

By: Varun Nagpal

Overview of this book

Android phones available in today’s market have a wide variety of powerful and highly precise sensors. Interesting applications can be built with them such as a local weather app using weather sensors, analyzing risky driving behavior using motion sensors, a fitness tracker using step-counter sensors, and so on. Sensors in external devices such as Android Watch, Body Analyzer & Weight Machine, Running Speed Cell, and so on can also be connected and used from your Android app running on your phone. Moving further, this book will provide the skills required to use sensors in your Android applications. It will walk you through all the fundamentals of sensors and will provide a thorough understanding of the Android Sensor Framework. You will also get to learn how to write code for the supportive infrastructure such as background services, scheduled and long running background threads, and databases for saving sensor data. Additionally, you will learn how to connect and use sensors in external devices from your Android app using the Google Fit platform. By the end of the book, you will be well versed in the use of Android sensors and programming to build interactive applications.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Android Sensor Programming By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Time for action – knowing individual sensors' capabilities


Android phones are manufactured by different OEMs, which use different vendors to get their sensors. It is very much possible that two different Android phones have different gyroscope sensors, which will have different ranges and other properties. Before developing a universal logic based on sensors, it's important to keep in mind sensor's individual properties and capabilities, which may vary from device to device. In this section, we will explore the common methods for finding out the properties and capabilities of a sensor:

  1. We will show the sensor properties in the individual TextView on the screen. In the following code snippet, the TextViewSensor, and SensorManager variables are declared:

          public class SensorCapabilityActivity extends Activity { 
     
            private SensorManager mSensorManager; 
            private int mSensorType; 
            private Sensor mSensor; 
            private TextView mSensorNameTextView...