Accelerometer

Getting Started

The accelerometer sensor is used to measure the force of acceleration acting on the phone. The sensor reports this force for each of the three principal axes, the x axis, y axis and, the z axis. The values obtained from the sensor are in metres per second squared, $m/s^2$.

The x, y and z axes of a standard smartphone

Adding an Accelerometer to your app

To add an Accelerometer to your app:

1. Navigate to the Blocks tab of your project.

2. Under the App Features heading, locate Sensors.

3. Click the ⊕ symbol next to Sensor.

4. Select Accelerometer from the provided menu.

5. Click Add.

You will see a settings panel where you can set:

• The Name of the Accelerometer

• Whether the Accelerometer is Enabled

• Whether the Sensitivity of the Accelerometer is low, medium or high

You can either confirm your choices and create the Accelerometer, or delete the Accelerometer.

Change Settings of Accelerometer

You will see the sensors you have added to your app underneath the Sensors section of your blocks.

If you click on the ⚙ icon next to your Accelerometer, you will be able to edit its settings as seen in the panels above. You can click on your Accelerometer's name to access its drawer of blocks.‌

Properties

Property	Description	Data Type
Enabled	Toggle whether the component is functioning in your app	True/False
Sensitivity	Set how sensitive the accelerometer is to movement, where higher sensitivity will react to smaller movements	Select from list: [low, medium, high]

Blocks

Events

Shaking

There may be some instances where you want to start an event by shaking your mobile device or when the mobile device is shook. There is a Shaking event that you can add to your blocks that has sensitivity levels of high, medium and low

Changes

When the accelerometer sensor detects a change in the force acting on the phone the Changes event will be fired. Each time the event fires the four associated parameters will be updated.

Parameter	Type	Returns
xAcceleration	Number	Change in speed of the phone, along the x axis, in $m/s^2$
yAcceleration	Number	Change in speed of the phone, along the y axis, in $m/s^2$
zAcceleration	Number	Change in speed of the phone, along the z axis, in $m/s^2$
error	String	Error message from sensor

Functions

Get Acceleration on X, Y, Z axes

You can get the values for xAcceleration, yAcceleration and zAcceleration at any time with the following blocks.

Properties

Enabled

By default, the accelerometer sensor will be turned on, but you can use the Enabled property to read its current state and to change its state, i.e turn the sensor on and off.

Property	Type	Default
set Enabled	Bool	True
get Enabled	Bool

Sensitivity

You can use the Sensitivity blocks to set the sensitivity of the Accelerometer and get its current level of sensitivity.

Property	Type	Default
set Sensitivity	one of [low, medium, high]	low
get Sensitivity	one of [low, medium, high]