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This article is part 6 of the series "XNA for Silverlight developers":

• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 0 – Why should I care?
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 1 – Fundamentals
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 2 – Text rendering
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 3 - Animation (transforms)
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 4 - Animation (frame-based)
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures)
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 6 - Input (accelerometer)
• XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 7 - Collision detection

Jeff Prosise introduces the accelerometer API in Silverlight for Windows Phone and demonstrates how to build apps that can do cool things with it.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

One of the sensor devices present in every Windows phone is an accelerometer that provides real-time acceleration data in the X, Y, and Z directions. Applications can use that data to determine a phone’s 3D spatial orientation, and to detect changes in that orientation. Under the hood, Silverlight for Windows Phone uses the accelerometer to determine the page orientation. But the accelerometer can do much more than just differentiate between portrait and landscape: it can be used to build apps that simulate physics. Ever seen the popular iPhone game named Labyrinth, in which you guide a marble through a maze by tilting the phone? Labyrinth is a great example of an app that uses an accelerometer.

Dave Edson and Greg Hogdal have written a wonderful article about using the accelerometer on Windows Phone 7. It describes how the native API is working. They have also made a simple class named AccelerometerHelper, which is very useful and makes the work with the accelerometer an easy job.

In this blog post we will talk about the different ways you can use the accelerometer API in Windows Phone 7.  We  also include a class called AccelerometerHelper  that uses the Microsoft supplied managed API and provides a variety of data for you to experiment with and find the right solution for your application.

You can read the full story here.

Windows Phone 7 (WP7) will have an accelerometer in it. The framework namespace that covers the accelerometer is Microsoft.Devices.Sensors. The class we care about here is the Accelerometer class. This class has 2 important methods Start and Stop. As you can likely guess, start tells the system you want to start reading values from the accelerometer and stop means you are done. The Accelerometer also has an important event called ReadingChanged. This event fires once you have started the accelerometer and one of the accelerometer values has changed. The event uses the AccelerometerReadingEventArgs class to return back the values that have changed. There are 3 important values, X, Y, and Z. Each represents the force of acceleration on that axis.