Sensor & Sensoribility
Tutorials – Cordova Sensor
Frameworks like Cordova make creating simple mobile apps quite easy. Making apps that use your phone's sensor is slightly trickier, but, thanks to a new universal standard, things are not as hard as you may think.
In the May 2018 issue of Linux Magazine, you learned how to read and transfer GPS data from a phone to a computer [1]. That made me wonder if you could also play with data collected from other sensors on your phone. The answer I knew immediately would be "yes," but could it be done in simple enough way that would allow me to explain it in a shortish tutorial written in plain English?
My first instinct was to use an existing app. I found several apps that looked promising but ended up having to discard them all, because they were proprietary and tended to leak data, or they were unstable and crashed, or the code was very old and no longer maintained.
There was one that caught my eye: SSJ Creator [2], which is open source, developed by researchers, and has an interesting node-based interface (Figure 1) that lets you configure which sensor gets read and where you pipe its output (Figure 2).
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