Orientation vector calculation from accelerometer and magnetometer sensors in Android

Paul Kocialkowski — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:13:00 +0100

While reversing the Galaxy Tab 2 sensors, I have been looking for a way to calculate the orientation vector from acceleration and magnetic field vectors: I've looked at any sensors implementation I could find and each time, this was being held into some proprietary component, to the point that the Galaxy Tab 2 has an user-space blob dedicated to this task (orientationd). Since I am not an expert at physics, I soon gave up on writing a free orientationd implementation, which was really a shame given the time I spent making the geomagnetic sensor work properly. I just realized that there was one last implementation I didn't look at, that is the free software user-space program for AKM8975. So many thanks to Asahi Kasei: I was able to reuse that code directly and it worked perfectly at first try.
That's pretty amazing!

All the glory details are in the akmdfs/AKFS_APIs_8975/AKFS_Direction.c file. To put it in a nutshell:

In the end, I think this piece of code from that free software implementation made my day!

Paul Kocialkowski's coding blog - Tag akm8975

Orientation vector calculation from accelerometer and magnetometer sensors in Android