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ZDNET key takeaways

• This free app can level up your experiments.
• Anything your phone sensors can pick up, this app can use.
• Find out just how much information your phone can track.

I love getting my geek on, and I do so every day. But sometimes, I need access to scientific tools that are either way out of my price range or inaccessible.

The good news is that my Pixel 9 Pro smartphone includes several tools for such purposes. Those tools are the various sensors that the OS and the installed apps depend on. The sensors are used for a range of tasks, including sensing ambient light, recording steps taken, directions on maps, screen rotation, and much more.

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Now, imagine if you could unlock the device’s scientific capability by accessing those sensors. By installing a single app, you would have access to the phone’s sensors for things like acceleration, acoustics, color and luminance, speed, mechanics, timers, inclination, and magnetism. 

Imagine the possibilities

Well, developers at Aachen University have done just that and created the open-source Android app, Phyphox (short for “physical phone experiments”). This free app can read information from your phone’s accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, magnetometer, light sensor, and GPS. 

If your phone has a barometer, the app can access that capability as well. The app can read data in real time, analyze it, and even export the data to a file.

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For example, I wanted to know the incline of the stairs leading to my office loft. Thanks to Phyphox, I know that the incline is -32 degrees. I also wanted to test the audio spectrum in my office to find the peak frequency and found it to be 93.75 Hz. 

The current barometric pressure is 999.524 hPa. I could also measure distance using Sonar. And the luminance in my office is currently .177 (it’s really dark as I write this article). However, the luminance coming from my main monitor is 3.4.

I also realized the app would allow me to record the Hue, Saturation, and Value of a color. Thanks to that information, I could find the exact color that I wanted to paint my walls in my new condo.

Looking for experiments 

Yeah, this app is fascinating on so many levels, and with it, there’s almost no end to the experimentation you can pull off. Want to measure the magnetron strength of your microwave? Phyphox can do that. 

After installing Phyphox, I found myself looking for experiments to undertake. For instance, I wanted to compare the strength of magnetic fields emanating from different devices, so I opened the Magnetometer, started the test, and held the phone up to various pieces of equipment. 

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I wanted to see the differences between the three pickups in my Steinberger guitar. It came as no surprise that the neck and bridge pickups were far stronger than the center pickup.

In total, there are 35 different tests you can run with Phyphox. There are even four different stopwatches (acoustic, motion, optical, and proximity), which give you an amazing amount of flexibility. 

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You can also open the Audio Spectrum tool to find the peak frequency, the musical note, and cents from the notes (a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals).

An invaluable tool

To explain everything Phyphox can do would take hours because it offers so many capabilities, and using Phyphox is quite simple (so long as you know what a tool does and what you want to get out of it). 

If you’re into experimentation, you will love this app. I wasn’t so sure of its features after installation, but once I started using Phyphox, I found it so fascinating that I used it more and more.

If you enjoy scientific tools, want to experiment with various things, or tend to be curious about challenges that regular apps can’t satisfy, Phyphox is exactly what you want.

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Trust me when I tell you that you’ll find Phyphox to be an invaluable tool for not only your experimentation but for so much more. 

You can install this free, easy-to-use app from the Google Play Store. Even if you don’t use it for experimentation, it’s pretty amazing to see just how much data your phone can capture. That potential alone is worth the (free) price of entry.