Modern computers, specially the notebook computers, come with many different types of sensors build inside them. For example, the geo-location sensors are pretty common in notebook PC’s these days. The geo-location sensors have a GPD chip inside them and they can locate your computer’s location in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates. Similarly, there are light sensors in some computers which sense the level of brightness in the room (or wherever your computer is) and adjust the screen brightness accordingly. Most of these sensors work in the background and used by Windows or other applications, but if you are curious about the values and data being captured by these sensors in your computer, then you can use the free Grand software.
Grand software from the SZ developement team, shows you the current values of all the sensors on your computer including the geo-location sensor, ambient light sensor, time sensor and more. It can detect the values from both GPS based location sensors and the IP address based location sensors.
The Grand software comes in a portable ZIP archive, so you can just extract it to a folder and run Grand.exe from there. It will immediately fetch all the values from all the supported sensors in your computers. In the following screenshot, it is displaying the sensor values from the Windows Location Provider in Windows 8:
If it shows the message that “No Sensors Found”, then you perhaps have no sensors in your computer or the sensors are turned off. In Windows 8, you can quickly turn on the location sensor by running the pre-installed Weather App. All the sensors can also be enabled from the Location and Sensors category in the Control Panel.
If you do not have any location sensor in Windows 7, then you can install GeoSense for Windows and it will act as a virtual location sensor for Windows. It gets the location data based on your IP address.
Conclusion: If you are curious about the current values of all the sensors in your Windows computer, then you can use the Grand freeware to see their values. It can show the values of location sensor, time sensor, ambient light sensor and so on.
You can download Grand from https://www.the-sz.com/products/grand/.