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

Chapter 5. The Motion, Position, and Fingerprint Sensors

This chapter will introduce you to the motion, position, and fingerprint sensors. We will learn in detail about all the motion sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, linear acceleration, gravity, and significant motion) and position sensors (magnetometer and orientation). As a learning exercise for the chapter, we will develop three small applications. The first application will detect a shake using the accelerometer sensor, the second one will tell the earth's magnetic field direction using the orientation sensor, and the third one will use the fingerprint sensor to authenticate the user.

The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Understanding the motion-based sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, linear acceleration, gravity, and significant motion sensors)
  • Understanding the position-based sensors (magnetometer and orientation sensors)
  • Understanding the newly introduced fingerprint sensor and its supporting APIs
  • How to use the accelerometer...