I miss seti@home.
Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
81–90 of 92 posts
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought this was disabled above certain speeds to prevent those chips being used in Missiles?
For the limits the speed is 1200 mph and the altitude 59,000 ft. A commercial airliner won’t exceed 650 mph or 40,000 ft.
I think those are the old COCOM limits which are no longer in effect. I believe that currently the only limit is 600 m/s (which is nice, since when there were both speed and altitude limits some manufacturers OR'd them and some manufacturers AND'd them, so it wasn't clear if altitude alone would be enough to disable a device until you found out the hard way)
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
This looks a lot like "GPS Status" and it used to be really good. Recent comments on the Play Store do not sound good though.
It used to be, but a lot of data got pay/subscription walled I think. I would recommend GPS Test, it's open source, no ads and does just as much. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.gp...
Yea GPS Test is great!
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#84This reminds me of something I read long ago when I was just a child. A computer magazine had a project where you used an FM radio, a computer probably a Commodore, and a plotter (who had one of those?!). The FM signal could detect meteor strikes in the atmosphere, you wrote a bit of code, the plotter mapped the strikes.
Used to be everyone had an FM radio and no plotter. Now everyone has a printer, but no FM radio.
Forget the FM radio, people hardly have commuters any more.
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#85Wow! But which editor approved to place an iPhone while it’s only available for Android?
I'm glad I am not the only person found this amusing.
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#86Tangentially related, but there's another cool app that turns your phone into a cosmic ray detector: https://cosmicrayapp.com/ It turns out that cosmic rays pass through your phone more frequently than you might expect.
Interesting! How it works:
> The application works by detecting lit pixels in the phone’s camera when no light is entering. These pixels are lit as result of cosmic rays, local background radiation, or sometimes just noise.
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea is interesting, but there are some disadvantages of the app itself (see below). Maybe developers can read this and implement some changes. - the phone should have non-obscured view of the sky. Thus having a phone charging and logging the data while it is on the desk inside a house doesn't work that well (red or orange indicator of the measurements quality, even near a big window). - speaking of charging, the…
If obstruction is static, such when one is charging the phone, it would affect absolute values but would still provide useful relative change.
Your phone may not be moving, but the satellites are. The obstruction is not static in that case.
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#88I had an idea a few months ago that this just made me remember. I was thinking that I could come up with some way of mining crypto but instead of guessing hashes I would be proving that I was actively sending weather/sky data. So people actively participating in the sensor network would get rewarded. Proof of… sky?
Re: Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea is interesting, but there are some disadvantages of the app itself (see below). Maybe developers can read this and implement some changes. - the phone should have non-obscured view of the sky. Thus having a phone charging and logging the data while it is on the desk inside a house doesn't work that well (red or orange indicator of the measurements quality, even near a big window). - speaking of charging, the…
Hypothetically they could be using an account / login process to allow them to filter out measurements from devices that for whatever reason (hardware / environment / etc) to be sending low quality data. Alternatively they could have used device id without having the user setup an account but that actually feels more intrusive. Not saying that is a reason but it could be one of the non-user visible rationales. I too…
They can do the same with a random 64 character identifier