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

Understanding environmental sensors


Environment-based sensors measure environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, and pressure) around the phone and report values only in one dimension (only one value in the values[] array). Temperature and humidity sensors have an on-change reporting mode, that is, they will report values whenever there is a change in values from the last reported values, whereas the pressure sensor has a continuous reporting mode; that is, it will report values continuously as per the suggested time interval. Environmental sensors are hardware-based and are only available if a device manufacturer has built them into a device. Because of this, it's particularly important that you verify, at runtime, that an environment sensor exists before you attempt to acquire data from it. Also, unlike motion sensors and position sensors, which often require high-pass or low-pass filtering, environment sensors do not typically require any data filtering or data processing:

  • The temperature...