Experiment Layouts and Capabilities

[RobertGrover]

I’m working on creating a series of experiments using Phyphox with our BLE connected sensor device, databot.us.com.  On board are a number of environmental sensors in addition to an IMU.  I am interested in the capabilities of the editor for creating experiments like the applause meter.  We have a fun activity for example in which students compete to achieve the highest level of CO2.  Or exercises in which they have to move with great precision and their efforts are tracked by the accelerometer.  I’m also interested in what capabilities there are for enhancing the layouts - changing the background color, labels, etc.  is there a place where I can access the .phyphox file for some of the experiments?  Does anyone out there have some sample files from which I can learn?  I’m going through the wiki and have figured out the basics  but I always seem to do better studying working examples.  Thanks to anyone out there who can assist!

[Sebastian Staacks]

Allow me to start with the (more or less obvious) official part of the answer: The experiments shipped with phpyhox can be found at https://github.com/Staacks/phyphox-experiments or in the "Open Experiment" menu of our editor (https://phyphox.org/editor).

But I am also interested in seeing more creative ways to use our file format

[RobertGrover]

That was very helpful and right under my nose, thanks!  

Is there a way to change the color bar on the top of the experiment after you enter it?  I have a custom color for my experiment theme that displays in the main menu, light blue for environmental and earth science experiments.  I'd like that to carry over to the actual experiment, but it is replacing it with the default phyphox orange.  See screen cap attached.

[Sebastian Staacks]

No, at the moment the bar at the top remains orange. I remember that I thought about it, but I think that in the end it was more annoying to implement than it was worth it. Text and icons have to switch between black and white depending on the luminosity of the chosen color and some details like the little bar below the active tab or the color of highlighted edit boxes and checkmarks need to adapt as well. It is certainly possible, but not a quick change.

[RobertGrover]

Got it, thanks. What is the color code for the background? I'm trying to use the separator as a transparent spacer element. I tried black but it's not quite right.

[Sebastian Staacks]

Currently, the background is 404040, which is the default in the editor.

Incidentally, this question probably saved me from a mistake right now. I am thinking about making the background a bit darker (like 202020) and would have forgotten about this element. Still, you should go ahead with 404040. If I change the background, I need to adapt this specific value and should maybe introduce a specifically transparent color.

[RobertGrover]

Currently, the background is 404040, which is the default in the editor.

Incidentally, this question probably saved me from a mistake right now. I am thinking about making the background a bit darker (like 202020) and would have forgotten about this element. Still, you should go ahead with 404040. If I change the background, I need to adapt this specific value and should maybe introduce a specifically transparent color.

That looks great, thanks.  Is there any debugging messaging available that I may not be seeing?  I'm basically uploading to the editor, if it is good it says loaded successfully.  But if it doesn't I have no clue what is wrong.  I'm spending a lot of time combing through these files line by line to isolate problems.  Occasionally a file will load successfully and then when I bring it up in Phyphox it will throw an error and typically point to the line that is causing the problem.  Am I missing anything?

[Sebastian Staacks]

So, you are working directly with the XML code? In this case I would not use the editor at all. It is designed to load its own files and create something useable when laoding the existing experiments (if possible), but it does not support everything our XML format can do and it possibly less efficient format. You can directly push your phyphox-file to phyphox and you may find that some things are valid that just have not been tried with the editor and phyphox should tell you the exact line if it is not happy with the XML file. I like to edit my phyphox-files in a local folder that is synced with a cloud service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. or in my case our University's "sciebo") and then open the experiment from the cloud service's app. You can also edit it in a location that is available from the internet via a simple URL (a webserver or a file on a cloud service that is shared with a web link that directly points to the file - not to a download page) and put this URL into any QR-code generator on the web to use this QR code for any change you make to this file.

[RobertGrover]

I'm using an editor, Komodo, and uploading the .phyphox through the online editor. If it doesn't like it there is no message, it just doesn't provide the "file successfully uploaded" message so I go hunting. Not a big deal, was just wondering if I was missing something that would speed that process up.

Do you recommend setting up our own service to host these files or is it OK to keep them on phyphox?

One other question, is there any support for doing some data manipulation / calculations in the .phyphox file? For example taking the 3 acc values from the sensors and doing a linear acceleration calculation on the phyphox side. We can do it on the arduino side, but it's more data to send and we're running into some obstacles with the amount of data we're sending.

[Sebastian Staacks]

Since I know your use-case: Yes, I think setting up your own service will make things easier for you. For example, as you asked in the other thread about sharing multiple experiments at once, which cannot be done with our editor. Simply put all your experiments (the phyphox-files) in a single zip file, upload them to your server and create a QR-code that points to this zip file. (You may replace "http://" or "https://" by "phyphox://" in the address if you want to avoid the confusion that a regular QR scanner tries to open the URL in a webbrowser.)

Another very important advantage is that you can update your experiments without the need to deploy new QR codes. If you change anything in our editor, you need to create a new QR code and any user who still has the old QR code will receive the old experiment. If you host it yourself, you can decide to simply replace the existing zip file or a phyphox-file within the zip file and the existing QR codes will yield the updated experiments instead.

One other question, is there any support for doing some data manipulation / calculations in the .phyphox file? For example taking the 3 acc values from the sensors and doing a linear acceleration calculation on the phyphox side. We can do it on the arduino side, but it's more data to send and we're running into some obstacles with the amount of data we're sending.

Not sure if I understand the question correctly. You probably know the analysis options from the editor or the documentation of our file format. Every analysis done by phyphox is defined in our file format. If you are asking for sensor fusion, I would say that it might be possible to some extend, but it might not be too much fun to implement in our format. But numerical integration and filters via Fourier transforms are in principle possible - at some point it just gets a bit annoying to implement and we do not really support loops and only somewhat awkward conditionals.