phyphox

RWTH Aachen University

About this app

Did you know that you are carrying a 3D magnetometer? That you can use your phone as a pendulum to measure earth's local gravitational acceleration? That you can turn your phone into a sonar?

phyphox gives you access to the sensors of your phone either directly or through ready-to-play experiments which analyze your data and let you export raw data along with the results for further analysis. You can even define your own experiments on phyphox.org and share them with colleagues, students and friends.

Selected Features:
- A selection of pre-defined experiments. Just press play to start.
- Export your data to a range of widely used formats
- Remote-control your experiment through a web interface from any PC on the same network as your phone. No need to install anything on those PCs - all you need is a modern web browser.
- Define your own experiments by selecting sensor inputs, defining analysis steps and creating views as an interface using our web-editor (http://phyphox.org/editor). The analysis can consists of just adding two values or using advanced methods like Fourier transforms and crosscorrelation. We offer a whole toolbox of analysis functions.

Sensors supported:
- Accelerometer
- Magnetometer
- Gyroscope
- Light intensity
- Pressure
- Microphone
- Proximity
- GPS
*some sensors are not present on every phone.

Export formats
- CSV (Comma separated values)
- CSV (Tab-separated values)
- Excel
(if you need other formats, please let us know)


This app has been developed at the 2nd Institute of Physics A at the RWTH Aachen University.

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Explanation for the permissions requested

If you have Android 6.0 or newer, some permissions will only be asked for when needed.

Internet: This grants phyphox network access, which is required to load experiments from online resources or when using the remote access. Both are only done when requested by the user and no other data is transmitted.
Bluetooth: Used to access external sensors.
Read external storage: This is may be necessary when opening an experiment stored on the device.
Record audio: Required to use the microphone in experiments.
Location: Used to access GPS for location-based experiments.
Camera: Used to scan QR codes for external experiment configurations.

Ratings and reviews

It is hard to believe that such a valuable, versatile, and well-organized app exists, never mind for free and without ads or other bloat. If I could suggest one improvement: I was very surprised that you can't view the spectra you've taken over time as "carpet"-style spectrograms. I'd really like to see that functionality.

I was using phyphox to record some barometric pressure data over several days on an old phone. The first time I did it, everything seemed to work, though the export process isn't straightforward. The second time I tried it, I couldn't export the data I needed before the app let me exit the experiment without prompting me to save any of my data and then crashed. I have no idea if the data is recorded anywhere or if it's even recoverable.

I found phyphox on my phone, as if flashed or tunneled. Default settings don't allow remote access but the owner is able to enable that, sensor by sensor. That's useful for a remote audio engineer (perhaps a PhD with yrs of training in comm, physics, coding & engineering). So I was disturbed to discover my apk was configured for remote wi-fi access without permission. I think my line was compromised illegally I'm confident Google will figure specifics. A🇺🇸asset≠abuse by ***.

What's new

- New image support in experiment configurations. (Not yet used in default configurations, but can be implemented by external ones.)
- Improved acoustic stopwatch performance, allowing for minimum delay settings below the internal audio buffer size of the device.
- Various fixes for large fonts and Android 4 devices
- Fix problems related to Bluetooth devices that act as input and output.
More on https://phyphox.org/wiki/index.php/Version_history#1.1.16