Professional Android Sensor Programming

Chapter 5

Overview of Physical Sensors

What's in this chapter?

Understanding the available sensors and how they actually work.

Explaining the physical values the sensors measure and providing a physical intuition for what these values mean.

Understanding potential applications of each sensor and code for common use cases.

Before the introduction of smartphones, people would interact with a range of narrowly focused sensors in daily life. Each sensor usually resided in a single device, and was usually designed for a single purpose (oven temperature sensors, tire pressure sensors, television remote control systems, and so on). The introduction of smartphones put an exciting range of sensors in the hands of users and developers. Previously, sensors rarely existed in such quantities, or in such close and continuous proximity to the user. The availability of the multiple sensors on a single device adds a wide array of uses for the device.

Starting with Android 1.5 (API level 3), a standard set of sensors and the associated sensor API has been made available. In Android 2.3 (API level 9), new sensors and tools were added to the Android developer's toolbox. The standard sensors now include the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer (compass), light sensor, proximity sensor, relative humidity sensor and pressure sensor. The tools added in API level 9 include methods to get rotation matrices, quaternions (an alternate representation of rotations), and “synthetic” sensors. These provide ...