Bit and pieces of android app development - DIY woodworking India

Bit and pieces of android app development - DIY woodworking India

Being in the tech world as a network engineer for almost a decade, I have always tried to keep myself up to date with the evolving technologies. It often eats up my free time. But believe me, its really good. There are so many things in there, unless you try it, you won't realise it. One of those things which I have tried is android programming.

As smartphones have become more and more popular, more and more people are connected via internet. Information transfer has become lightening fast. Everything is at your finger tip. To alleviate my learnings, I have started exploring android application development. I had an end goal of course. I was residing in an area where the road was full of potholes and there was no street light at all. Often, my back used to take the heat at night time. I was thinking what I can do to address that problem or perhaps solve it if possible. If there were 1 or 2 potholes, that would have been practical. But there were hundreds! I started raising complaints to fill those with the town planning authority. As expected, nothing happened as usual. Then I thought how about avoiding those potholes by putting sign boards! Too many it will be. But how about plotting the location of potholes on a Google map and alerting the user if he/she is about to hit it? Thats a good idea!

Therefore, my research started and I started gathering information about what all things I need to gather information about potholes. Either I have to inspect a pothole and plot the map manually or I have to  make everything automatic. Of course latter was better.

To detect a pothole, we need a sensor, an accelerometer. What is an accelerometer? It is a device which can give you acceleration value in XYZ direction. Just to mention, acceleration means rate of change of velocity. Its a vector entity. How we can use it for pothole detection? Whenever we hit a pothole, we fall vertically down. It may be very little but still there is a fall vertically. Therefore, accelerometer shows increase in acceleration value in vertical direction. That is the clue. Once you get values or reading like that, capture the geo location or latitude/longitude. Logically these are the two things we will be needing.

Now where I can find an accelerometer?
Its available in most of the android smartphones! Just google it, you will find related android API probably from android SDK 6 itself and accelerometer is present from that moment on.

Once we have the inbuilt accelerometer, we must know how to get the readings. There comes the android APIs, details about which we can find in google developer site. Lets stop here today. Next blog will be more about the entities in android application development. Till then, bye.