{"id":1954,"date":"2018-01-26T16:00:59","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T21:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rpchurchill.com\/wordpress\/?p=1954"},"modified":"2018-01-30T02:57:39","modified_gmt":"2018-01-30T07:57:39","slug":"generic-sensor-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rpchurchill.com\/wordpress\/posts\/2018\/01\/26\/generic-sensor-api\/","title":{"rendered":"Generic Sensor API"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday I attended a Meetup<\/a> hosted by Pittsburgh Code & Supply. This particular event was hosted by Brian Kardell<\/a> (see also here<\/a>) and was formally titled with the prefix “[Chapters Web Standards]:” I think to indicate that the talk is part of a series or a larger effort<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The talk itself (see slides here<\/a>) was delivered remotely from Denmark by Kenneth R. Christiansen<\/a>, who works for Intel on web standards.<\/p>\n

Here<\/a> is the current working draft standard for the Generic Sensor API.<\/p>\n

I drove up to Pittsburgh to see the talk because of my experience working with real-time, real-world systems that included sensors and actuators. I had even run into some of the specific issues discussed when I was experimenting with Three.js<\/a> and WebGL<\/a> in preparation for the talk<\/a> I gave at CharmCityJS<\/a>. I wrote about my investigations here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That preamble out of the way, the presentation was really interesting. It was also very dense and delivered very quickly. The speaker demanded a lot of his audience as he made it through all 67 slides in less than an hour. This worked because the audience probably self-selected for interest in the subject and because the slides are posted here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The talk described efforts to create a standard way of exposing and accessing sensors of various kinds. Many of these are built in to the devices themselves (like the accelerometers in three axes built into handheld devices like phones that allow sensing of orientation and other things) but the talk also described how to incorporate sensors built into external devices. One example involved an external Arduino board connected through the Chrome browser’s Bluetooth API<\/a> as shown here:<\/p>\n


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