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 the light and proximity sensors


The light sensor is a part of the environmental sensors, and the proximity sensor is a part of the positional sensors for Android. Both light and proximity sensors can be found in almost every Android device today. The light sensor is responsible for measuring the illuminance in lux. Illuminance is the amount of light striking a surface. It is also known as incident light, where the "incident" is the beam of light actually landing on the surface.

The proximity sensor measures the proximity of any object near the screen. There are two types of proximity sensor found on Android devices.

  • The first type of the proximity sensor provides the absolute distance in centimetres between the object and the phone. There are very few phones which support this type of proximity sensor.
  • The second type of sensor gives only two values in form of integers, which represents the proximity of the object from the phone. When the object is near, then the value is 0, while...