What free apps can make your phone into a tricorder(maybe a phaser) - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2019, 12:58:16 pm
content: Ever since I was a kid I always wanted a tricorder, a phaser too, but I think I'm going to have to wait until I'm older for those to come out.So what free tech apps make your phone useful?First app: sound: dbmeter for iPhone and probably android. Has a sound spectrum graph. What I found interesting was how much noise there is abouve 10k Hz like wind noises have a large high frequency component or thinks like crackling plastic. A "silent room" really has lots of low frequency too!There are also apps that track cond trails on airplanes and tells you the flight but I cant find that one.

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2019, 01:04:42 pm
content: Why don't you just google search for 'tricorder app' ? There are enough hits!

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 17, 2019, 01:52:56 pm
content: There's "Tricorder 5.12" as well as Audalyzer. The developer has moved on but the apps are still very useful. (I would like to see some other developer continue working on the projects.)

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2019, 12:34:35 pm
content: Quote from: Gyro on August 17, 2019, 01:04:42 pmI didn't mean literally. What I meant was: what are some interesting apps that exist that you would never think of that open the possibilities of your phone. Such as they have a magnetic field app and the plane tracking app. If the answer is a simple google search away I have already done it and didn't find what I was looking for or I mean something more involved then that. A lot of people here think when I ask questions I should use google instead but they are missing my intentions, or taking what I say too literally.

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 18, 2019, 12:57:04 pm
content: This is just a role of reducing it to what sensors and data is available to your device at the current moment, and thinking forward on how you can use that, you already have your position to within 1m, and the orientation of the device, so its very easy to plot or draw spacial features around you, such as the satellies orbiting earth and where to look from your location, if yo had access to the data you might be able to see a visualisation of all the underground infrastructure underneath you in a city, equivilent to a poor mans ground penetrating radar,just about every phone out there has a barometer, so your phone should not really need to connect to the internet to give a crude forcast for today, or even if the atmospheric pressure is going to harm you, e.g. sound an alarm when your altitude gets above what requires additional oxygen, a phone in a zip lock bag even acts as a decent depth gauge up to about 2 meters deep where the sensor starts to saturate,Then there are the more obscure ones, e.g. lets say you ended up on mars, the ambient light sensor could be used over a number of days to figure out the day length of the planet accordingly, equally the accelerometer would give a fairly accurate measure of the surface gravity, this is assuming nothing else told the device and it had to work it out on its owna number of phones these days have a somewhat gimmicky heart rate monitor, if its not too stupidly designed that could be part of how you monitor someone who is injured, otherwise there is an infrared focussing led for the camera, that could likely pull double duty as a pulse monitor,then you just have the immense flexibility of a portable data display and manipulation terminal,The main difference to an actual TV portraid tricorder would be what appears to be some combined lidar / radar / xray scanner, and a gas / liquid chromatograph, the lidar / radar already has tech that could be included in a device, the chromatograph tech exists on those scales, but at present would require frequent maintainance and for that level of compactness is not cheap, with much less accuracy than a proper lab unit, still it could likely tell you gas composition, how much organics there are, and depending on the type may be able to determine if cellular life is present,If you imagine that tech keeps on progressing towards the hard limits like the uncertainty principle, there is a lot of room to make very good lab grade instruments into something low enough power and robust enough for a hand held device, just at present it would be stupidly costly and of limited use to the lay person.