alt Hacker NewsPhyphox – Physical Experiments Using a Smartphone
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The coolest thing I ever did with that was finding wires in a friends wall - we needed to drill a hole and it was unclear whether the wires went up (problem) or right from the outlet. I didn't have a cable finder on hand but did have the epiphany to put a large load on the outlet (we used a kettle, a hairdryer would also work, just needs a lot of watts) and use the Fourier transform magnet spectrum to find the 50 Hz grid frequency in the wall. Worked beautifully.
Sadly, since most smartphone magnetometers seem to have a sample rate of 100/s, this will not be applicable to Americans and everyone else with a 60 Hz grid frequency, the 50 Hz were already at the Nyquist–Shannon limit.
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.
Seems like a more advanced version of Arduino Science Journal https://www.arduino.cc/education/science-journal/
I've had great fun using Phyphox to visualise my hand getting closer/farther from my phone based on the presence of my magnet implant. So many cool little things the app can visualise and measure, especially when used it creative ways.
I used it just the other day.
My parents have a sound bowl, and I wanted to know the resonance frequency. Took an audio spectrum, zoomed in on the first peak, read the frequency (iirc it was around 208 Hz).
It’s the GOAT - I showed the app to a bunch of secondary school physics teachers and they were thrilled.
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.
The title was slightly editorialized for clarity.
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).
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Cool app dude
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