My Brain Hurts

Windows Mobile developers that have used the Windows Mobile Unified Sensor API may know that painful reverse engineering process took place to add support for Samsung and HTC phones. This is because no phone manufacturer has released the internal API specifications for their device sensors!

However, Samsung recently released the SDK for their Light Sensor and Accelerometer on their new Samsung Mobile Innovator website. I don’t have a Samsung phone available at the moment, but the SDK looks pretty straightforward! And although it would have been ideal if Samsung had officially supported the Sensor API, this is a step in the right direction! A published API is better than no API. Hopefully HTC follows suit!

Here’s a snapshot of the managed bindings that were included with some of the SDK sample code:

namespace SamsungMobileSdk
{
    public class Accelerometer
    {
        public struct Vector
        {
            public float x;
            public float y;
            public float z;
        }

        public struct Capabilities
        {
            public uint callbackPeriod; // in milliseconds
        }

        public delegate void EventHandler(Vector v);

        [DllImport(Shared.SamsungMobileSDKDllName, EntryPoint = "SmiAccelerometerGetVector")]
        public static extern SmiResultCode GetVector(ref Vector accel);

        [DllImport(Shared.SamsungMobileSDKDllName, EntryPoint = "SmiAccelerometerGetCapabilities")]
        public static extern SmiResultCode GetCapabilities(ref Capabilities cap);

        [DllImport(Shared.SamsungMobileSDKDllName, EntryPoint = "SmiAccelerometerRegisterHandler")]
        public static extern SmiResultCode RegisterHandler(uint period, EventHandler handler);

        [DllImport(Shared.SamsungMobileSDKDllName, EntryPoint = "SmiAccelerometerUnregisterHandler")]
        public static extern SmiResultCode UnregisterHandler();
    }
}

I’ll be adding support for the official Samsung API to the Sensor API shortly.