Version 1.0.4: Acoustic Stopwatch

So, here is the new update 1.0.4 with our new experiment: The acoustic stopwatch. Again, this is more a tool than a full experiment, but a very useful one. The watch starts counting when there is a noise above a (selectable) threshold and it will stop again on a second noise.

A simple usage case is a free fall experiment, in which you create the first noise when releasing a weight (for example by popping a balloon or hitting a mount) and the second sound is generated by the impact of the weight. Of course, there are some other improvements and bugfixes as well as an update to the file format (to make the acoustic stopwatch possible). You will find the full list at the end of this post.

Future plans

For now, it looks like this will be the last minor 1.0.x update and I will now start working on the next major step, which will be 1.1.0. Of course, if there are some major bugs or a nice new experiment, which can easily be added, there will be a 1.0.5 inbetween, but for now I will look at the two major changes: Better graphs (zooming, multi-data etc.) and a better workflow for custom experiments without transferring the files manually.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell when this will be ready. This depends on how much time I am able to invest and on how complex the new features are. Also, the graphs will require some testing before an official release – but I will share info on the progress.

Now for the changelog:

Main Changes

• New experiment: Acoustic stopwatch
• More options when exporting in CSV format: There now are variants with a comma as decimal point and the number format is now consistent across both platforms.
• Grey out experiments that are unavailable
• Add video links to the experiment menu as well (or any link marked as highlight)

Changes to the phyphox file format

• New analysis module: if
• New view element: button
• New initializing attribute for buffers

Fixes for Android

• Improved behavior when hiding keyboard
• Fix possible crash when switching to different app
• Update views in stopped state
• Fix auto-orientation not respecting system setting
• Fix opening phyphox:// URLs with parameters
• Fix for the (half-official) Bluetooth support. Note, that this will changed and replaced by Bluetooth 4.0 / BLE in the future.
• Apply size setting of value view element to the remote interface.

Fixes for iOS

• Fix magnetometer calibration factor. (Note: We are using the uncalibrated magnetometer values, which may be way off from what you expect for small fields like the earth’s magnetic field, but which should be good for stronger field. However, we might switch to the calibrated one in the future to avoid confusion, but which might introduce other problems.)
• Fix for not stripping trailing zeros if a fixed number of digits is defined for a value view element