Sensors are key for smartphones to interact and read data from their environment. They enable features like screen-lock during a call, rotating the display when you flip the phone or adjusting the screen brightness when you walk outside.

Our team has made good progress enabling the sensors of the Librem 5 in software. Here are a few of the recent changes.

Sensor improvements

Gyro support has been added to the mainline kernel. With the Librem 5 now aware of orientation, tilting the phone can be used as controller input or to read positioning. It could be used to create a sleep monitor app, a step counter, a simple motion detector or for gaming.

The Librem 5 now reports light level in a more accurate and standard way. This data can be pulled in by an application and will at some point be used to adjust the display automatically.

Thanks to community involvement/Guido from our team, screen rotation using the accelerometer and locking the screen via the proximity sensor are both in the testing phase.

The software stack around sensors is coming together piece by piece. It will take longer for all sensors to be working fully. Software updates will shortly bring features like auto-rotate and proximity screen locking.