Recently downloaded the phyphox from F-Droid and thought about this while thinking about what all stuff I could do with it.
Are there any online resources about such stuff?
What all things have you(or people you know, in your locality etc) done along that line?
And not only big thigs, if you’re tracking other stuff, please do share your experience on that too.
Edit:
Sharing the github page of the app too:
https://github.com/phyphox/phyphox-android
I keep track of prices in cost per kg (or liter) so I am not fooled by shrinkflation and so that I know when a good sale is, without having to remember all prices. Basically just have a giant spreadsheet with the numbers.
A fun experiment I did recently was to measure the speed of sound with my oscilloscope. I wired up a speaker and a microphone at a known distance from each other, connected the oscilloscope to both sides and measured how long it took between sound trigger & reception. I came within several meters/second accuracy which I think is a nice result for a basic home lab setup.
I also track a lot of metrics around the house using Home Assistant. Temperature, humidity, power usage, light levels, heating, but also stuff like total meters of filament used, total objects printed, system metrics. I like statistics and it’s fun to compare months/years and clearly see the results of improved isolation for example.
I checked out phyphox and it’s so cool. Gonna show this to my wife who is a high school science teacher. Young students love running experiments like these. When you give a curious mind a tool to measure the world with, and set them loose, good things happen. Thanks!
I enjoyed using phyphox while on a plane recently. I found it fun to track the pressure and to see how it loosely corresponded to my own subjective experience of ascending vs descending.
I can’t recall any “useful” things I’ve used the app for, but I really enjoy having it — it makes me feel powerful. Like, it’s nice to think that if I did have some ideas of experiments to run, I could. It feels fitting to be able to access the sensors, because there are many ways in which our electronic devices nowadays aren’t (or don’t feel like) our own, so this feels like a small amount of clawing back power, even if I’m not using it for much.
- Whenever I change something in my coffee setup, I do blind tastings for myself and sometimes others.
- Scrum retrospectives and Kaizens in a way are experiments to see how to improve 🤷♂️
- I regularly answer ACT-Advisor questions to see how I’m doing over time https://stevenchayes.com/tools/
This is a really interesting thread, OP - well done, and thanks for the app recommendation
Thank you.
Are there any apps that you’d like to recommend?
I track lots of things, all the time; my body composition, performance at specific tasks… As for experiments, I’ve done a few:
- Tried to see if I could 3D print small channels and fill them with metal using electroplating (couldn’t).
- I also made a DIY ultrasound imaging device and tested it. Did actually produce some images, but it wouldn’t penetrate very far in tissues.
Elaborate on the ultrasound please
Of course!
I wanted to test whether a cheap piezo buzzer could be used as a crude ultrasound probe. It worked, so I tried to upgrade it into full-blown ultrasound imaging. The third iteration of that did produce an image, using a piezo buzzer cut in sections, a cheap FPGA, a MCU, custom PCB and mostly 3D printed pieces (acoustic lens, etc.). Aside from the expected low resolution, turned out that it wouldn’t image anything beyond about 1 cm.
I did make a fourth iteration of the device, much smaller and theoretically much better. But life happened and I never finished the coding part.
congrats on the excellent project.
how many pieces of the piezo and which frequency of operation did you use?
how did you design/source the acoustic lens design?
seriously well done!!
Thank you! :)
I managed to get 4 piezo elements to work, limited by the FPGA. This was actually enough for some reasonable horizontal resolution since I used a phase array configuration, so the downside was the electronics had to generate very precisely timed pulses. The fourth prototype had 10 working elements thanks to replacing the MCU-FPGA duo with just a more powerful FPGA and using conductive glue to more reliably connect the elements themselves.
It was configurable to use any even divisor of 120 MHz, but in practice anything over 1 MHz would not even make it out of the acoustic lens due to the low voltage and low quality impedance matching layer. And much lower frequencies are barely useful anyways, so the true working range was narrow.
For the acoustic lens, I used the parametric design software OpenSCAD, with an equation for aberration-free lenses I had found somewhere and saved long before (will find it if you want) and the speed of sound in the different materials.
Cool.
Did you notice any trends from your tracking?
Things that others may also be find useful/intetesting?Well, one thing I’ve noticed in most measures that involve mental things (mood, performance…) is that lots of things seem to be cyclical. For example, mood is often alternating (more so in my case), but productivity and burnout also tend to repeat predictably as long as the routine doesn’t change.
Also, I’m maximally performant in tasks when most stable (good sleep, moderate mood, medication, no drugs…), but maximally productive when in a better mood.
Probably not the answer you are looking for, but I run a ton of math on gaming. Doninos, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering exct. I used to play in a lot of tournaments. Not professional, I do not want that stress. But, I usually placed top 4.
Cool. What is it like?
Is it like finding an optimized solution?Yeah. All games tend to be games of probability and statistics. Once you figure out how to do the math, then comes testing and experimentations.
Sure I’ll go. I grow vanilla as a side project to many other things. I’ve done some controlled backyard experiments with replication between my vineyard and another in my community to look at the impact of temperature on growth rates.
We plan on publishing but I’ve got enough day job publications going at once right now that a hobby paper is something I have a hard time justifying the time for, but the data is done and collected. We just used one and paper.
Sorry if this seems strange, but do you do data analysis? If not, I’d be happy to explore and visualize the data! It’s always interesting to me to do it.
Yep. 15 years in the trade. I even put together some cute python code to make bar plots where the bars were in the pattern of Vanilla vines with leaves in them. I just literally do not have the time to get back into it because I’m either writing or analyzing on 5 other papers at once and I’ve got two teams of analysts on other projects that I have to provide leadership for. It’s just not something I can justify spending my free time on.
It’s important to me that my hobbies don’t become burdensome so I’m more than happy to just let it sit for a time where I have a couple free cycles to write it up and publish. Well probably just get it out as a note in a local ag journal. We took the data with the intention of building a growing degree day model for Vanilla.
Cool. Thank you.
Is the process like vernalisation?
This was years ago now; I did an experiment to test various AA battery chemistries in real-world conditions to determine if the price difference was worth it. This was tangentially related to amateur radio, I first got the idea from overhearing a conversation on 2 meters.
I used rechargeable Ni-MH, zinc oxide “Heavy Duty” batteries, alkalines, and lithiums to play a lot of video games on my Nintendo Wii. (the batteries in the controller) I found that the Lithum batteries performed less than twice as long as the alkaline batteries, nowhere near worth their price. The “Heavy Duty” batteries were less than half of the alkalines but that actually made them more cost effective. The Ni-MH batteries had the shortest single charge of them all, I forget what it worked out to be the break even point.
One thing I did note was the Lithium batteries were noticeably lighter than the Alkalines, so if weight is an issue they may be a viable option.
Thank you.
I’ve used phyphox for lots of stuff. It’s great for looking at raw data from your phone’s sensors but there are also a lot of great experiments built in to the app. The university that develops it has a playlist showcasing them all, it’s a great way to spend a weekend.
Thank you
I build an off-grid solar power set on my back yard and tracked it’s results for two years. It was only 500W in 3 directions (east, south and west)
It first charged the batteries and then used the rest to heat water if no direct use was present.
Learned a lot and noticed that many ideas and mental images about it were bullshit. Still usefull if applied to right applications.
Not gonna buy a bigger set and will use the existing ones to just heat water till they give up.
What kind of heating element did you use for the water? What type of control system to send power to it?
Thank you.
Learned a lot and noticed that many ideas and mental images about it were bullshit.
What were the main ones?
Some relatives of mine have been thinking about rooftop solar and had talked about it to me too. Didn’t comment much, other than generic talking points of warranty, on whether is on or off-grid etc.
Care to elaborate on the bullshit?
