App Inventor Extensions

Barometer Sensor Extension

See the App Inventor Extensions document about how to use an App Inventor Extension.

For questions about this extension or bug reports please start a new thread in the App Inventor community. Thank you.

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Jan 19th, 2016: Version 1 of the Barometer Sensor Extension released for App Inventor version ai2extensions6 and Companion version 235.cdk2.

May 11th, 2016: Version 2 released: property SeaLevelPressure added.

Aug 11th, 2016: Version 2a: avoid DX execution failed error: build each extension separately

Description

Barometer Sensor component.
Minimum Android version to be able to use that sensor is Android 2.3 (API Level 9).
Required permissions: none
Thank you George for being the sponsor of this extension.

Properties

Returns whether sensor is available.

Returns whether sensor is enabled.

Specifies whether sensor is enabled.

Returns the current pressure in hPa (millibar). To return meaningful values the sensor must be enabled.

Computes the Altitude in meters from the atmospheric pressure and the pressure at sea level. To return meaningful values the sensor must be enabled. This is an approximation, because for the pressure at sea level per default an average sea-level pressure in hPa (millibar) will be used.
You can set the pressure at sea level in the seaLevelPressure property.

Returns reference sea level pressure.

Specifies reference sea level pressure.

Events

Event indicating that a pressure change occurred.
Also calculates the Altitude in meters from the atmospheric pressure and the pressure at sea level. This is an approximation, because for the pressure at sea level per default an average sea-level pressure in hPa (millibar) will be used.

You can set the pressure at sea level in the seaLevelPressure property.

The question is: what to use as the reference pressure? This will change with the weather and will drift over time. Typically you would do some sort of calibration to set this value and possibly update it. It depends on your use case what the right solution is.

If properly calibrated, pressure based altitude is considerably more accurate then gps based altitude especially if you are interested in altitude differences rather than absolute altitudes.

Example App: Barometer

Test

Tested successfully on Nexus 5 running Android 6.0.1 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N running Android 4.0.4 (no barometer sensor available).

Terms and Conditions

• Have fun and use this extension in your App Inventor projects! Pura Vida!
• THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
• This is is the only authorized place to download this extension. It is not allowed to host this extension somewhere else and offer it for others to download, be it on another website or market place or similar. The reason is, everybody should be able to have the opportunity to donate something in case you like my work. You are allowed to provide a link to this site, so others can download the extension here. You will find the most up to date version always here including documentation and usage examples. Thank you for your kind understanding.

Download

Download TaifunBarometer extension (aix file)
Download Barometer Test (aia file)
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This work by Pura Vida Apps is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
with attribution (name=Pura Vida Apps and link to the source site) required.