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

Getting air pressure from the phone's pressure sensor


The procedure to get values from the phone's pressure sensor is exactly the same as the previous example showing getting values from temperature sensors. The only difference is the sensor type. To get values from the pressure sensor, we have to specify the sensor type as TYPE_PRESSURE. All other best practices (initiating SensorManager, the Sensor object, and registering and unregistering the listener and sensor callback) remain the same as they were in the previous temperature sensor example.

Time for action – calculating the altitude using the pressure sensor

Once we have atmospheric pressure from the phone's pressure sensor, we can calculate the altitude of the phone using the getAltitude(float p0, float p1) method of the SensorManager class. The first parameter of the altitude API is the atmospheric pressure at sea level, and the second parameter is the atmospheric pressure of the current location, which can be obtained from the phone...