Author: Sebastian Staacks

Videos and materials of our annual training in Aachen 2019

In September we had our yearly teacher’s training in Aachen and we promised to release videos of the talks and all the material later on our website. This took longer than expected, but here they are, finally.

Unfortunately, since the training was held in German, the videos and all the material is in German. If you are interested in a talk in English, please stay tuned for our talk at the 36c3 in Leipzip.

Material: aachen2019-material.zip (34MB)

Talk 1: Introduction

Talk 2: Smartphone sensors

Talk 3: Experience and outlook

Collaborative sun trace on 22nd December

We are planning a big collaborative experiment on 22nd December 2019, in which you can participate. The 22nd December is the day of the winter solstice and we want to motivate as many users as possible to track the trace of the sun across the sky on that day. The idea is, that you simply point your phone at the sun and submit its orientation along with your location when the phone is aligned. This way, we will hopefully create a huge data set which we will share and which can be used by students to derive data like the axial tilt of Earth.

If you are interested in participating and helping, simply share the information about our experiment (especially on and shortly before 22nd December) and conduct it yourself. The actual experiment and short instructions can be found at https://phyphox.org/sun.

New events in Hamburg, Leipzig (36c3), Wuppertal and Bochum

First, I should explain to anyone who might be confused or even concerned what the image above is supposed to mean. Don’t worry, this is just this year’s design of the Chaos Communication Congress (36c3), which is one of the new events that have just been added to our calendar. This one might be particularly interesting even if you do not plan to attend it personally as all talks will be available online.

So, we have just added four events in Hamburg, Leipzig, Wuppertal and Bochum.

Version 1.1.3: Network interface

We have just released a new version with quite a few improvements and fixes. But most importantly, phyphox now has a new network interface. At the moment you will only notice (at the very bottom of the main menu) that it allows you to collect some data about your sensors, which you can submit to us as we try to build a sensor database.

However, some experiments using the network interface as well as its documentation and editor support will follow soon.

Changelog

Changes on Android and iOS

  • New network interface allowing to send and/or receive data to/from network services.
  • New sensor db experiment, that allows you to contribute information about your device to our new (upcoming) sensor database.
  • Highlight nearest BLE devices if multiple with same name are present.
  • Use common time reference for multiple sensors, improving their synchronization.
  • Location services (i.e. GPS) now use a database to translate elevation above the reference geoid and the WGS84 ellipsoid directly in phyphox and giving both values. This also fixes getting ellipsoid instead of geoid data on Android 10 devices.

Changes on Android

  • Notify user if location service is not enabled when trying to scan for BLE devices.
  • Fix attribute clash of phyphox and the web editor.
  • Fix remote access problem on Android 4 devices.
  • Improve title display for long titles
  • Code maintenance under the hood (thanks to “TacoTheDank”)

Changes on iOS

  • Fix wrong values if picking data points from logarithmic plots
  • Fix applause meter losing scores
  • Use advertised name of BLE devices instead of the local name buffered by iOS (for example fixing problems with Owon multimeters)
  • Update BLE scan results, so changes in signal strength can be seen
  • Fix analysis logic: Run analysis if input data has been changed by previous analysis run
  • Fix some analysis crashes due to invalid integers
  • Include EduRoom SDK (eduroom.de)
  • Accept old “out” attribute for audio inputs to fix compatibility issues with older experiments

File format version 1.8

  • Elements to define network interface
  • autoConnect function to allow connection to BLE devices without scanning
  • New formatting options for info elements: bold, italic, align and size
  • New option to ignore sensor availability

Version 1.1.2: Phyphox je od sada dostupan i na srpskom jeziku

We have just released another update with some bugfixes, some improvements (bright mode for remote access) and a Serbian translation thanks to Marina Dorocki. You can find more details in the changelog below.

Changelog

Changes on Android and iOS

  • Serbian translation
  • Remote access stores settings (font size, layout) until the end of the browser session
  • Remote access now has a bright mode (should help on low-contrast projectors)
  • Fix error in distance calculation of location/GPS experiment. (Introduced in 1.1.0, please check any distance data generated in 1.1.0 or 1.1.1)
  • Add 1/min to acceleration spectrum and magnetic spectrum to directly get RPM from engines

Changes on Android

  • Save scroll position of experiment list after entering an experiment or adding/removing items

Changes on iOS

  • Add gap between value and unit in value view elements to avoid confusing units
  • Show optional dialogs and hints (save experiment locally, press arrow to start, etc.) after showing the Bluetooth scan dialog instead of not showing them at all
  • Fix separators in experiment layouts

Version 1.1.1 with bugfixes

We heave just released version 1.1.1 with some important bugfixes. Please, if you still find any errors in phyphox, let us know via email (staacks@physik.rwth-aachen.de), via our forums or via the tracker on github.

Changelog

Changes on Android

  • Offer additional apps when exporting (using a view-intent in addition to the share-intent)
  • Fix crash in data picker

Changes on iOS

  • Fix: Elevator experiment not working due to an error in the new formula parser
  • Fix: Crash of color plot (mostly when starting the sonar experiment)
  • Fix: Color map not showing if any z value is infinite (encountered in magnetic spectrum)
  • Fix: Crash when picking data points in graph with history (i.e. in the sonar experiment)
  • Fix: Crash in reduce module for fewer y than x data points
  • Fixes for iOS 13: Crash when opening experiments and design of tab bar