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

Honestly, a really cool piece of work! Simple to use and operate, and really opened my eyes as to the sheer amount of STUFF my phone has to offer in terms of telemetry. I think what really opened my eyes was being able to detect the minute, fraction-of-a-decimal differences in barometric-pressure between various rooms in my home, from floor to ceiling. Impressive stuff! Definitely worth having on-hand.

This is what a utility app should be like. There's absolutely no ads or (from my experience) intrusive popups, it's completely free (although if your phone has some sensors missing you'd need to buy a new one, but that's not something the app can fix) and it has all the utilities and data exportation you could like.

This app is great. Looking through the experinens shows some basic capabilities of sensors. The stopwatches tied to light, sound and acceleration are favorites. Sensors often have a high resolutions/lots of sig figs. Export it and use that data for analysis. Can an AI tell a bunch of accelerometer data is a phone drop without context?

What’s new

New camera-based sensors to measure luma, luminance, hue, saturation and value
New camera-related experiments: Brightness stopwatch, color stopwatch, brightness spectrum
New UI elements: Slider, Dropdown and Toggle
Redesign of export/save dialogs to offer an additional download to filesystem button
The deprecated Apache-based webserver has been replaced with jlhttp (big thanks to Amicha R.)

Full list of changes at https://phyphox.org/wiki/index.php/Version_history#1.2.0