Pull single value from sensor without using an event

I need some help getting info from the orientation sensor. As I have seen in just about every tutorial/guide out there, the values are passed to an event (onSensorChanged(SensorEvent event) in which they can be manipulated.

My problem is that I don't want to ke开发者_运维技巧ep the electro-magnetic/orientation sensor running constantly (for the sake of battery life). I want to be able to turn it on, grab the current value and switch it off. Is there any way to do this?

I have done some searching and found that I can try multi-threading, but I'm not fully comfortable with that.

What I'm looking for is something like (Sorry for lack of formatting I can't seem to figure it out):

private void getOrientationNOW() {
   m_SensorManager.registerListener(mySensorEventListener, m_MagneticSensor, SensorManager.SENSOR_DELAY_FASTEST);
   //---->Something here to get the current value from the sensor
   m_SensorManager.unregisterListener(mySensorEventListener);
}

If this is possible, please help me!

Thank you all in advance!

When you register a listener for a sensor the activity will be called every time the sensor values changes according to the parameters. So if you want to get the values only one once what you could do is unregister the listener for that sensor after getting the value once.