Phyphox – Physical Experiments Using a Smartphone

(phyphox.org)

42 points | by _Microft 3 hours ago

9 comments

  • slow_typist 1 hour ago
    There is a paper you can cite if you use phyphox professionally.[1]

    In Germany phyphox is quite popular in physics education.

    However on android the sampling rate of the acceleration sensor is limited to 50/s. At least if you install through the official app store.

    [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6552/aac05e

  • samch 42 minutes ago
    One of my kids has science project due each quarter in school, and this is our go-to app. We’ve measured acceleration in an elevator, sound attenuation of an audio source in a small vacuum chamber, and the Doppler effect. The app makes it easy to capture and export the data points to make graphs. I highly recommend this even just to play around with.
  • eru 1 hour ago
  • crtasm 1 hour ago
  • tomaskafka 52 minutes ago
    It’s the GOAT - I showed the app to a bunch of secondary school physics teachers and they were thrilled.
  • DaSHacka 27 minutes ago
    I've been using Trail Sense [0] for sensor-related information after learning about it from a friend.

    The interface is more polished, but the information is less technical than Phyphox (as the app is geared towards being a survival toolkit).

    [0] https://github.com/kylecorry31/Trail-Sense

  • q3k 1 hour ago
    Good toolkit to have around. Recently used it to verify the true RPM of a system (using the accelerometer spectrum tool) against its control loop implementation.
    • TeMPOraL 57 minutes ago
      Indeed. I always keep it installed on my devices, as it turns the phone into a poor man's tricorder, and that's handy sometimes.

      Most recently I used it to check light levels at home in different rooms, to determine where we need to boost or replace LED strips. Sure, there's million Lux meter apps, but Phyphox is better than all of them and demonstrates why these things shouldn't be dedicated apps in the first place. In the past I also made use of EM and vibration frequency displays to troubleshoot hardware.

      A complement to that is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.intoorbit.... which, once upon a time, helped me track down a source of rage-inducing, late-night high-frequency beeping that was driving us insane - down to specific apartment in a block on the other side of the street. I ended up friends with those neighbors, after teaching them how to disable the alarm clock on their Bluetooth radio when they go away for a weekend.

  • _Microft 3 hours ago
    The title was slightly editorialized for clarity.
  • henryAlbigale 2 hours ago
    Cool app dude