Professional Android Sensor Programming

Chapter 9

Sensing the Environment

What's in this chapter?

Providing an example implementation of how to use the barometer to produce altitude

Comparing the altitude produced by GPS and the altitude produced using barometric pressure

Showing how to acquire external sea-level pressure data from a web service

Explaining use cases for barometric data

The past few chapters have discussed how to determine how a device is oriented in its environment and whether it is moving. This chapter discusses how a device can make sense of the environment itself. As stated in Chapter 5, Android supports many different sensors that can be used to make sense of the environment. This chapter focuses on one of the newest environment sensors supported by Android, the barometer.

Recall from Chapter 5 that the main purpose for the barometer is to detect the altitude of a given device. This sensor is useful when a device cannot obtain a GPS signal and still needs to provide altitude data.

To showcase the barometer sensor, this chapter adds altimeter functionality to the book's example app. The altimeter provides the ability to determine a device's current altitude as well as compute the relative altitude as the device's altitude changes. Because it does not rely solely on GPS data (which also provides altitude data), the altimeter will remain fully functional indoors where a GPS signal would probably be lost.

As explained in Chapter 5, altitude can be calculated by passing a barometer reading to the SensorManager.getAltitude() ...