Basic Sensors in iOS: Programming the Accelerometer, Gyroscope, and More

by Alasdair Allan

What really sets the iPhone apart from laptops and PCs is its use of onboard sensors, including those that are location-enabled. This concise book takes experienced iPhone and Mac developers on a detailed tour of iPhone and iPad hardware by explaining how these sensors work, and what they're capable of doing.With this book, you'll build sample applications for each sensor, and learn hands-on how to take advantage of the data each sensor produces. You'll gain valuable experience that you can immediately put to work inside your own iOS applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. This book helps you focus on:Camera: learn how to take pictures and video, create video thumbnails, customize video, and save media to the photo album Audio: use the media picker controller and access the iPod music library in your own application, and enable your app to record and play sampled audio Accelerometer: write an application that uses this sensor to determine device orientation Magnetometer: learn how this sensor verifies compass headings Core Motion: use this framework to receive motion data from both the accelerometer and the vibrational gyroscopeThis short book is part of a collection that will, along with new material, be compiled into a larger book, iOS Sensor Programming. The other books in this collection are Augmented Reality in iOS, Geolocation in iOS, and iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino.

Genres: Computers

108 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 22, 2011

About the author

Alasdair Allan is a British scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. An expert on the Internet of Things and sensor systems, he’s famous for hacking hotel radios, deploying a 500-node mesh sensor network at Google I/O, and for revealing, back in 2011, that Apple’s iPhone was tracking user location constantly. He has written for Make: Magazine, VICE/Motherboard, Hackster.io, Hackaday, and to the O’Reilly Radar. A former academic, he also built a peer-to-peer autonomous telescope network that detected what was, at the time, the most distant object ever discovered.

Reviews

[Matt Heavner · Rating 1 out of 5]

I find most of these "mini" O'Reilly books are not worth the money -- this was ~$20 for less detail than I can find online.. A good O'Reilly book is better (or a more useful reference) than what is online. This one isn't.