IV. THE IMPLEMENTED SETUP
The Android platform is ideal, especially for Java™
developers, in order to create innovative applications through
the use of hardware sensors. The authors tried out to learn how
to leverage the hardware capabilities of an Android-based
device. What is more, the physical device used for
experimental setup was a smartphone called Nexsus S. This
smartphone is equipped with a Android OS [15] and so
supports Hardware.sensors API too. The Nexsus S has the
following sensors: 3-axis gyroscope Accelerometer, Ambient
light sensor, Digital Compass, Proximity Sensor, Geomagnetic
sensor. In order to program the Nexsus S a programming
environment IDE for java must be used. In the Fig. 4 the front
panel of the IDE useful for developing programs on the
smartphone is depicted. The name of IDE is eclipse, this
environment allows the use of different programming
languages. Moreover, it is possible to install a plug-in that just
serves to debug the code for android smartphone. This plug-in
provides a variety of objects, one of this is a simulator that
gives the complete look and feel of a real Android-based
mobile phone, complete with keyboard and multi-touch
support. It can also be used in a variety of configurations to test
the app developed, such as landscape/portrait mode, network
strength, and roaming network. All of these options can be
configured using the AVD (emulator/Android Virtual Device)
manager integrated in Eclipse environment. The AVD is selfsufficient to emulate different devices available. You can create
different AVDs for different configurations and test your
application on each of them to make sure it is compatible
across device types.