TTG 1676 for Sunday 8 Mar 2020

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

@Leo the compass sensor in a smartphone is magnetic. You are probably thinking of the older days when the compass function was only provided via the GPs module. AFAIK all modern mid-range and higher smartphones added a magnetic sensor. The change was because a GPS based compass stops working when you are not moving enough distance for an accurate GPS difference to direction calculation.

You can check easily by starting a compass app and then bring a magnet close to the phone and moving it around the phone. You’ll see it react just like a traditional mechanical compass. (I verified this with my Pixel 3A just now).

The Scosche magnetic mounts I use clearly disrupt the compass sensor on my Pixel 3A rendering it useless. However once the car is in motion Google Maps uses the GPS location change to determine the heading.

Ref. https://www.scosche.com/downloads/dl/file/id/811/magicmount_faq.pdf