Accelerometer – swan tron dot com

January 23, 2012

Android Dev Teaser

Before the rugrat showed up, I managed to make some progress on my next project. I just realized that I hadn’t put together a teaser post, hence this quickie.

I started thinking about how to make a better UI to control my remote control via Android project. Instead of going with a touch base, I figured I could implement control utilizing the on-board orientation sensors.

This ultimately led to figuring out how to break said values out…a la this little app:

I wrote a simple app that dumps the sensor values of each x, y, and z axes, for values between -90 and +90 degrees.

The next step would to be to clean up the display, provide some visualizations, (graph-ish perhaps) and use the values to control something physical. No promises on the timeline, but if it gets to be too far out, I will dump this code on GitHub for general public perusal. Back to diapers…

January 4, 2012

Android Side Project

Much like the girl has decided to keep at the in-womb thing, I have decided to keep at the Java thing. Little brat. I decided to figure out how to dump accelerometer / orientation data off of the phone, for use with the IOIO.

In short, I am roughly attempting to see how the data exists in its natural state, in order to figure out how to scrub and interface with my physical components.

android side project beta — warning beta stage warning

So far, I have nice looking code that blasts a force close scenario. Great.

Anyhow, I’m hoping my time on this effort comes to a close and the girl decides to join us. Teamwork…I’ll code, she can practice her singing.

January 31, 2011

Android GPS Test

As I type this, there are over thirty satellites blasting around geo-sync orbits transmitting GPS data. As luck has it, my battery-ass-draining phone has a receiver built-in GPS receiver, of which now I am a master.

Not really, but I can read the info…

Location, time, velocity, etc. Not sure how to tune this yet, as the above was done via an emulator. Since my Studio 15 doesn’t exactly (read: at all) have a GPS receiver or accelerometer, I’m working somewhat blindly. I did have some luck when I dropped my app on the Droid 2…

…but that screen cap does a better job of showing the MLB Network reflection than the info on the screen. Sweet Lou should be in the top ten list of managers, FWIW. Glad he could make an appearance.

Back to the GPS stuff. Cross referencing the data that I managed to pull in from the SDK library info, I was able to verify that the elevation was fairly accurate (w/in a hundred yards of Bozo Wikipedia listing) and the latitude / longitude was functioning well to several yards accuracy, relatively speaking. Not too bad.

The next step would be to figure out how to put this to use. A ballistics chart would be pretty cool (read, profitable) if the elevation info could be read in automatically along with weather conditions. I’m not really sure…this one was more of an exercise in reading sensors and tossing out output. The accelerometer is next…I’ll shoot to provide a better write-up at that point. Less bonus baseball footage…or far more bonus baseball footage. Stay tuned.