EDIT: Working on a timing service with accelerometer. Why is the alarm manager toy code failing here though?

Question

My friend and I are teaching ourselves android by programming a toy app, literally. We made a simple game that uses the accelerometer. The game is just a maze game with a ball. We use the accelerometer to detect movement and use tile detections to determine whether the ball is on a path or hits a wall.

However, we want to build a timing service with the accelerometer as well. This timing service would determine when the user is being idle using the accelerometer (like 10 secs), issue a warning, then turn off the game. That is, kill the activity.

So what I am doing now is to see if I can throw up a message within 10 seconds of the game running on the widget. I am basing this exactly off the code found here:

I implemented the code found on that tutorial above as follows in my view below. I created a method called timingService and called it in my toyappView:

public void timingService(Context context, Activity activity){
    // get a Calendar object with current time
     Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();

 // add 10 seconds to the calendar object
 cal.add(Calendar.SECOND, 10);
 Intent intent = new Intent(context, AlarmReciever.class);
 intent.putExtra("alarm_message", "This is the alarm message");

 // In reality, you would want to have a static variable for the request code instead of 192837
 PendingIntent sender = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 192837, intent, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT);

 // Get the AlarmManager service
 AlarmManager am = (AlarmManager) activity.getSystemService(context.ALARM_SERVICE);
 am.set(AlarmManager.RTC_WAKEUP, cal.getTimeInMillis(), sender);


}

Here is the class it should be calling when the alarm goes off.

package com.example.toyapp;

import android.content.BroadcastReceiver;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.Toast;



public class AlarmReciever extends BroadcastReceiver{

    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
        try{
            Bundle bundle = intent.getExtras();
            String message = bundle.getString("alarm message");
            Toast.makeText(context, message, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

        }catch(Exception e){
            Toast.makeText(context, "There was an error somewhere", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

}

After here I just get stuck again. My AlarmReciever from the tutorial is never being called. Why? I ran debug with my emulator and it never goes into the AlarmReciever. As far as I am concerned, this game should go for 10 seconds and then call the AlarmReciever and display a message on my widgit. Right? I suspect my problem is in am.set? But I don't see why.

As always, thank you all for your patience. I appreciate your comments and insights as I teach myself how to write a toy app in android. This may seem silly to others, but I already put a lot of thought in this. So I would appreciate any help others would have to offer. Hope you let me off on that technicality. Also, I have a cold. I don't believe this duplicates other's problems on stackoverflow as this alarm is going to be modified for a accelerometer. I will change it from making a toast message to killing the game.

Warm Regards, GeekyOmega

PS - Some similar issues around, but found nothing that addressed why my class is not being called. I have a really bad cold too, so please let me off on that technicality. I'm trying. :-)

Answer 1

I would recommend using the AlarmManager. Every time your onSensorChanged(...) gets called you reset an alarm that will end your game in 10 seconds.