The design and implementation of a smartphone illuminance meter

Abstract

The proliferation of consumer smartphones has offered new opportunities for environmental sensing and mobile computation. Recent smartphone models - equipped with GPS trackers, accelerometers, megapixel cameras and rich software stacks - offer the possibility of emulating specialized tools completely in software. This paper documents recent efforts to build a robust, smartphone-based illuminance meter application, and describes its prototype implementation. Though hardware and software constraints prevent the complete development of such a prototype, its use and potential are demonstrated.