In this paper we present our new video features. Most smartphone experiments come in one of two ways: either by collecting live sensor data or by analyzing video recordings afterward. Our new feature now brings these two approaches together by enabling real-time experiments directly through the phone’s camera.

Users can simply point their camera at an experiment, select a region of the image, and instantly track properties such as brightness, relative luminance, or color values based on the HSV color model (hue, saturation, and value). With frame rates reaching up to 240 frames per second, you can capture fast processes with impressive temporal precision.

Because the camera data feeds directly into phyphox’s flexible analysis tools, users can create and customize a wide range of experiment configurations. This opens up new possibilities for measurements over large distances, improved data analysis in existing classic experiments, and highly accurate timing applications — all using nothing more than a smartphone camera.

A public experiment show (in German) for anyone who is interested in phyphox. The show will be moderated by Nicolas Wöhrl und Reinhard Remfort from the podcast “Methodisch Inkorrekt”. More info

An international conference on smartphone experiments in STEM education with several invited speakers, hands-on experiments, poster presentations and of course news from the phyphox team. More info

Our yearly teacher training (in German) with workshops for different experience levels. Get started with first simple experiments, learn how to modify phyphox with the editor or mix DIY Arduino projects with phyphox. More info

Today we say goodbye to Jens after handling our public outreach for more than 5 years. While we’re sad to see him leave we are optimistic to see more chances to work together in the future.

You can still reach him through his phyphox email address and of course his social media channels.

Follow-up video (30.04.2020)

Follow-up video (04.04.2020)

Follow-up video (04.04.2020)

Follow-up video (28.3.2020)

Follow-up video (24.3.2020)

Changelog

Changes on Android and iOS

• Spanish translation.
• Turkish translation (this has partially been enabled before by accident).
• Spectrum experiments now have a peak frequency history plot.
• The apply-zoom dialog when leaving a graph now defaults to “reset”, but remembers if you want to keep the zoom for the next time.
• Fix: Remote interface breaks if NaN / null values are to be plotted. (Typically in frequency history or Doppler effect experiments)

Changes on Android

• Fix for Bluetooth Experiments failing to load if using specific conversion functions on many Android devices.
• Fix Bluetooth input conversion “formattedString” failing when using indices without explicitly specifying empty labels.
• Fix: GPS experiments crash on phone that do not offer a network-based location service.
• Fix black background of graph toolbar on some devices (i.e. Pixel 3).

Changes on iOS

• Fix unresponsive Bluetooth scan result dialog.
• Fix for Bluetooth: Pick write with/without response depending on peripheral’s capabilities.
• Fix Bluetooth input conversion “formattedString” failing when using labels (this is different than the similar Android fix).
• Fix for crash when sending an empty /control or /export request to the remote access webserver.

File format version 1.9

• New Bluetooth device atttribute “mtu” to request a specific MTU size.
• Support for new sensor type “attitude”.

A little footnote, in case someone is wondering: Spanish is a great example for which the concept of representing languages with flags fails miserably. None of the translators above comes from Spain, so just using the Spanish flag feels rather unfair and wrong, but it needs to be in the picture as it is the one that is best associated with the language. Then which other flags to include? Well, I chose the ones matching our translators, but there is a long list of countries that might feel left out when just looking at the picture…