various sensor using application

One of the things that I love the most about my Android is the number of sensors that it has.
My phone is the Droid, and it features an accelerometer, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, and an e-compass to name a few. I previously covered how the Tricorder app takes advantage of these sensors in a cool Star Trek themed application. In addition to these sensors, there are also more practical things that you may want to know about the status of your Android phone and the network and the environment where it is located.
To this end, I decided to go out in search of some more cool Android apps that integrate with your phone’s sensors to provide you with some interesting information about the status of your phone

Check GPS Satellite Status

Many GPS-enabled Android apps simply connect to GPS satellites and initiate the application with your location. However, there are times when you may want to know what the status of your phone’s GPS system is – such as how many satellites are transmitting, your current GPS directly and location and more. The GPS Status app taps into your GPS receiver and provides you with all of that information in a very cool graphical format.

Analyze Your Network

One common use for a mobile phone is to identify local Wi-Fi networks. The Android Market offers a number of cool Android apps that show the current speed, strength and even the volume of transmitted data for the Wi-Fi signals that your phone can connect to. The following are two of my favorite apps. The first is called NetCounter, and it simply displays a tally of the data transfer that took place over either your cellular line or your Wi-Fi connection.

This is a cool way to keep track of your data transfer rates, especially if you don’t have an unlimited data plan through your cellular provider. Another cool app to tap into the status of your Wi-Fi signal is aptly called SpeedTest. The application lets you run a data transmission test to check the transfer speed of the current data network you’re connected to. When you fire off the test, you’ll see the dial launch as the system pings the remote server.

Once the test completes, the dial rests on your current upload speed in kbps, and the application reports both your upload and download speeds resulting from the speed test.

In addition to the data transfer speed of your current network, you might also want to know the general signal strength of the local Wi-Fi network. The Wifi Analyzer app provides a cool graphical display of the current strength of your Wi-Fi connection. The signal strength shown here was the strength of my home Wi-Fi network in dBm sitting across the house from my wireless router.

As I walked across the house closer to where the router is located, the needle gradually worked its way up the scale. I was pretty impressed with how accurate the application appeared to be – every little movement I made either closer or further from the router resulted in a bounce of the display needle.

Turn Your Android Into a Motion Detector

The last app that I’d like to cover that makes use of the accelerometer (if your phone has one), is Seismo. This application basically senses every little shake or wobble of the phone, and plots it out on a graph. I produced the chart below by holding the phone steady, and then very gently bouncing the phone in intervals. The sensor was very sensitive, and caught every movement I made with the phone.

I can think of a number of uses for this application that would really come in handy. In any situation where you need to determine if an object or a flat surface is wobbling or shaking, all you’d have to do is lay your phone down flat on the object or surface and run this application. The motion gets logged and you can save the chart to a log file on your SD card.