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Android Sensor Programming By Example

Android Sensor Programming By Example

By : Nagpal
4.8 (4)
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Android Sensor Programming By Example

Android Sensor Programming By Example

4.8 (4)
By: 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 (8 chapters)
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Best practice for accessing sensors

Android devices are manufactured by different OEMs (Original Equipment Manufactures) and come with various configurations. Each OEM is free to support its own set of sensors, which again come from different vendors. This creates the problem of device fragmentation. This problem is further complicated by addition and deprecation of sensors with different Android API levels. The following are some best practices that will help you deal with this device fragmentation problem and avoid common pitfalls and mistakes:

  • Before using the sensor coordinate system, confirm the default orientation mode of the device and check for the orientation of the x and y axes.
  • Check the availability, range, minimum delay, reporting modes, and resolution of the sensor before using it.
  • Before selecting the sampling period of any sensor, check for its power consumption. Also, keep your application precision and accuracy needs in mind before deciding the sampling period. It's recommended that you select one of the constants given by the operating system.
  • Do not block or do heavy processing on the OnSensorChanged() method. Your app might miss callbacks or go into ANR (Application Not Responding) mode. The app might even crash in the worst cases if this callback is blocked.
  • Every registration of the event listener should be paired with the un-registration of the same listener. This should be done at the right time and place. (More on this, in the next chapter).
  • Avoid using deprecated sensors and any of the deprecated APIs.
  • Never write any kind of application logic based on the delay between the sensor events. Always use the timestamp from the sensor event to do your time-related calculations.
  • If some sensors are mandatory for your application to function, then use the uses-feature filter in the Manifest.xml file and change the required value to true.
  • Check your application and its sensor behavior on more than one device, as the sensor values and range may vary with different devices.
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Android Sensor Programming By Example
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