Harvesting Your Old Smartphone Sensors

If you check the list of sensors that even a basic smartphone has in the manual you will be surprised to see a long list. Ambient light sensor, Gyroscope, Magnetometer, GPS, Sound noise level, Gravity etc are very common even in the cheapest smartphones. If you have an old smartphone, which you may not be using for some other issues, can still have all the sensors working properly. You can stream the sensor data to another computer or cloud, which you can process and possibly perform some actions.

I used an app called Sensor Node where you can mention the IOT server address and Topic name where the phone's sensor data should be streamed to.

Finally the following web utility (thanks to https://github.com/matbor ) can be used to visualize the data in real time.



https://github.com/neilghosh/mqtt2highcharts