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

Time for action – maintaining step history with the step detector sensor


The step counter sensor works well when we have to deal with the total number of steps taken by the user since the last reboot (power on) of the phone. It doesn't cater to our purpose when we have to maintain the history of each and every step taken by the user. The step counter sensor may combine some steps and process them together and will only update with an aggregated count instead of reporting the individual step detail. For such cases, the step detector sensor is the right choice. In our example, we will be using the step detector sensor to store the details of each step taken by the user, and we will show the total number of steps for each day since the application was installed. Our example will consist of three major components of android, namely, service, the SQLite database, and activity.

The Android service will be used to listen to all the individual step details, using the step counter sensor, when the...