Acceleration in a for..... loop - iphone

Question

I have a for....loop and the UI then is blocked when in the loop.
Is the accelerometer also blocked?
I have following code in viewDidLoad
- (void)viewDidLoad{
[super viewDidLoad];
UIAccelerometer *accel = [UIAccelerometer sharedAccelerometer];
accel.delegate = self;
accel.updateInterval = 1.0f/60.0f;
}
and further down
- (void)accelerometer:(UIAccelerometer *)acel didAccelerate:(UIAcceleration *)acceleration {
acc=acceleration.x;
}
then an IBAction connected to a button which starts a loop
- (IBAction)doSomething {
for (int n = 1; n<=100;n++) {
// do someting in the loop
NSLog(#"x: %g", acc);
}
}
when logging the accelerometer x value it shows only the first value when the button is pressed and does not update when the loop is running. The same first value is repeating continuously.
Is there a way to log the acceleration when in the loop?

Answer 1

It would seem that UIAccelerometer needs the main thread so is getting blocked by the for...loop. Core Motion also has an accelerometer property in the CMMotionManager object that can report acceleration, and does better backgrounding since it's what Nike+ uses. There are two ways to access it - a pull method where you get the data directly, or a call-back. To be honest, I just tried it and couldn't get the call-back to work (mostly because it requires NSOperationQueue and I don't have much experience with that so I'm probably putting it on the wrong queue), but if you're ok with pulling data, which your approach seems to need, then this works:
CMMotionManager *motionManager = [[CMMotionManager alloc] init];
[motionManager startAccelerometerUpdates];
for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
{
NSLog(#"Acceleration: %f", motionManager.accelerometerData.acceleration.x);
}
I just tried it on a device and the values reported in the for...loop update with the current acceleration.
Source: UIBackgroundModes and UIAccelerometer