Smartphone Sensors Unlocked: Turn Your Phone Into A Physics Lab

These days, most of us have a smartphone. They are so commonplace that we rarely stop to consider how amazing they truly are. The open-source project Phyphox has provided easy access to your phone’s sensors for over a decade. We featured it years ago, and the Phyphox team continues to update this versatile application.

Phyphox is designed to use your phone as a sensor for physics experiments, offering a list of prebuilt experiments created by others that you can try yourself. But that’s not all—this app provides access to the many sensors built into your phone. Unlike many applications that access these sensors, Phyphox is open-source, with all its code available on its GitHub page.

The available sensors depend on your smartphone, but you can typically access readings from accelerometers, GPS, gyroscopes, magnetometers, barometers, microphones, cameras, and more. The app includes clever prebuilt experiments, like measuring an elevator’s speed using your phone’s barometer or determining a color’s HSV value with the camera. Beyond phone sensors, the Phyphox team has added support for Arduino BLE devices, enabling you to collect and graph telemetry from your Arduino projects in a centralized hub.

Thanks [Alfius] for sharing this versatile application that unlocks a myriad of uses for your phone’s sensors. You can use a phone for so many things. Really.