Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool(esa.int)
esa.int
Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Navigation/Turn_your_phone_into_a_space_monitoring_tool
91 comments
> Is this not handled by a GNSS chip in hardware, or the OS driver/kernel?
All of the GNSS calculation is handled in hardware but that hardware often exposes quite a lot of intermediate data.
All of the GNSS calculation is handled in hardware but that hardware often exposes quite a lot of intermediate data.
> “The combination of Galileo dual band smartphone receivers and Android’s support for raw GNSS data recording
Newer Android versions have fairly low-level APIs - not supported on all phones, but some expose quite a lot of detail.
Newer Android versions have fairly low-level APIs - not supported on all phones, but some expose quite a lot of detail.
Here is an example of pretty stunning amount of visual detail provided by one of popular GPS data app on Android: https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/lT3TpHarUx89Z7HIf043aU...
At least I can confirm it works will all navigation constellations on Samsung S10.
See also on F-Droid/OsmAnd
https://gitlab.com/mvglasow/satstat
https://gitlab.com/mvglasow/satstat
I had a lot of fun with that gps status app when I first got a smart phone - you could hold your phone up to the window while flying (to get gps signal) and see the 630mph or whatever speed you were going.
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.
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I think those are the old COCOM limits which are no longer in effect.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)
Ah, yeah that's been updated since I've worked with GPS
I do this with google maps even without an internet connection it shows roughly where we are in the US on a flight
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...
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!
Link doesn't work for me and the URL is obscured for some reason. Is my guess correct that you're linking the GPSTest app?
No, it's not GPSTest but "GPS Status & Toolbox".
Yeah, its the "all sensor data at a glance page"
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eclipsim.g...
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, there are no settings which allow to instruct the app to be dormant and automatically start recording when phone is charging.
- Account and login process is needed to upload the collected data. Why is it even the case? Can't the data be uploaded anonymously with just some unique phone identifier, or without one just relying on coordinates and other GNSS related measurements. Data can be cross-checked with others nearby and outliers can be removed just from that. There is no real need to know my name, email and create a leader-board or at least have an option of anonymous upload.
- 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, there are no settings which allow to instruct the app to be dormant and automatically start recording when phone is charging.
- Account and login process is needed to upload the collected data. Why is it even the case? Can't the data be uploaded anonymously with just some unique phone identifier, or without one just relying on coordinates and other GNSS related measurements. Data can be cross-checked with others nearby and outliers can be removed just from that. There is no real need to know my name, email and create a leader-board or at least have an option of anonymous upload.
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 would prefer an anonymous option
Not saying that is a reason but it could be one of the non-user visible rationales.
I too would prefer an anonymous option
They can do the same with a random 64 character identifier
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.
My phone is charging from a portable battery just as often if not more often than a wall charger.
Wow! 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.
i suspect most ppl don't know the difference anyway.
mvp is still the name of the game.
mvp is still the name of the game.
Yes, but the designer should know, and that's not professional.
Even on the APP website, they use an SVG shape of an iPhone5 (5s, SE 1st Gen).
Seriously, that was an interesting question to research for a moment - is it really an iPhone (from the visual) and if: what type? I think its the version 6 regular size or an SE 2020, because the button until version 5 had a symbol on it and some like the 6s seems to have a different postioning of the power button, others don't seem to have the proportions. And then again, its probably a digital rendering (search for "mockup iphone"). Last but not least the visuals of apple iPhones have been copied countless times to cheap android knockoffs.
If you really want to get low-level data (past what the GPS status apps give you) Google built their own GNSS logger for android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
I recommend turning on Force Full GNSS measurements in android developer settings if you're going to try messing with it.
I recommend turning on Force Full GNSS measurements in android developer settings if you're going to try messing with it.
Interesting, I'm wondering why they didn't even mention this availability in their website, I would have turned on that setting just to farm more data for their app.
Tangentially 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.
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.
> 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.
Interestingly the app is made in Unity. A couple of oddities, but having this leader board function was definitely an interesting idea.
Sadly either my old phone's GPS is not great or my windowsill's viability to satellites just isn't great. It'll be very interesting to see the data pipelines they have to clean up the mountains of data they're going to be receiving.
Sadly either my old phone's GPS is not great or my windowsill's viability to satellites just isn't great. It'll be very interesting to see the data pipelines they have to clean up the mountains of data they're going to be receiving.
Probably why I cant get any connections to my phone, from the windowsill!
This 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.
Now everyone has a printer, but no FM radio.
Forget the FM radio, people hardly have commuters any more.
Link to install the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiasa.cama...
Interesting project, can't wait to help ESA out a bit.
Seems like the phone will just track the satellites via GPS, so it's not even that battery intensive. Overnight left charging could provide a lot of data.
The fact that there's a leaderboard makes it even more gamified.
Don't phones use a combination of various global positioning systems these days, including glonass and galileo?
Actually how much detailed GPS information can phones access? Most 'common' apps will use the wider 'location services', which combine GNSS data with things like known wifi points and 3/4/5g radio towers to provide better accuracy.
Actually how much detailed GPS information can phones access? Most 'common' apps will use the wider 'location services', which combine GNSS data with things like known wifi points and 3/4/5g radio towers to provide better accuracy.
If you install this app, you'll see exactly what GPS data your phone is picking up.
https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest
I can see GPS, Galileo, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese ones.
https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest
I can see GPS, Galileo, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese ones.
Only on Google store, and an open source google store client (Aurora) just says "failed to fetch app details"... why is it so hard to just put an apk on your website if you actually want people to use your app?
> As well as helping to create new Earth and space weather forecasting models, participants are also in with the chance to win prizes
They seem to be quite keen on getting users and I'd be interested in the data myself (don't care for prizes), but then they make it a Google ecosystem exclusive?
Edit: sent them an email using the address on the contact page. Let's see.
> As well as helping to create new Earth and space weather forecasting models, participants are also in with the chance to win prizes
They seem to be quite keen on getting users and I'd be interested in the data myself (don't care for prizes), but then they make it a Google ecosystem exclusive?
Edit: sent them an email using the address on the contact page. Let's see.
why is it so hard to just put an apk on your website
Then you'd have to field all the "How do I use this file?" and "Why doesn't this work on my phone?" questions yourself.
Then you'd have to field all the "How do I use this file?" and "Why doesn't this work on my phone?" questions yourself.
Or you just put the apk behind a big obvious button saying "Advanced users" and a checkbox for users to affirm they are comfortable installing/working with APKs themselves, which is required before the download can start.
You might still get the questions but at least then support teams can legitimately say that kind of advice is not provided as the users agreed to handle such matters.
You might still get the questions but at least then support teams can legitimately say that kind of advice is not provided as the users agreed to handle such matters.
You put a GIANT Google Play link , and a smaller link for alternative stores that will open a plain html page dense of information and with big warnings to scare away the non-tech people.
and _how can i update my app?_
Android GPS API is quite a bit more low-level than in iOS. You can get data about visible satellites where as (to my understanding) in iOS you can't.
And another reason is that some devs, like me, don't want to pay Apple $100 year to have apps on the store, especially if they're free apps.
Plus I think the ability to run continuous high precision location queries in the background is severely limited in ios.
Yeah, I'm not on some locked-down apple device, I'd just like to run this on a regular Android.
Is this an issue with aab files not being pulled through?
Didn't know of Android App Bundles yet, thanks for that pointer!
Basically the aab is supposed to be smaller based on utilizing shared resources. But really it seems like Google is using aab to force devs into using Google's key/ signing management. I have no idea if aab format prevents an app from being in Aurora. It was just my random guess that the format might be causing an issue.
A small personal note: I totally favor scientific crowd-experiment, but ONLY if done in FLOSS and public terms. SmartPhones these days are surveillance devices maintained and paid by the formal owner while they serve far more their vendor and other player behind, with the formal owner as the last in the pyramid.
In that sense I have to refuse because I have to refuse the device used even by a formally FLOSS and public experiment. Of course asking to buy or buy and offer sensors devices to the masses is unfeasible BUT it's perfectly feasible, just, needed, asking to IMPOSE open hardware without lock-ins, FLOSS code on them and services with public APIs as a State law, gradually growing to exit actual extremely dangerous and sorry situation. Scientific institutions are among those best qualified to took such public statements. Avoiding them means avoiding part of the Scientific duty, witch is doing their best to improve the society.
In that sense I have to refuse because I have to refuse the device used even by a formally FLOSS and public experiment. Of course asking to buy or buy and offer sensors devices to the masses is unfeasible BUT it's perfectly feasible, just, needed, asking to IMPOSE open hardware without lock-ins, FLOSS code on them and services with public APIs as a State law, gradually growing to exit actual extremely dangerous and sorry situation. Scientific institutions are among those best qualified to took such public statements. Avoiding them means avoiding part of the Scientific duty, witch is doing their best to improve the society.
it’s fairly hard to find research participants
Anything "new" and "that demand a substantial social change" is hard, at least for start and for a not so short period of time... If no one start change never happen, if someone start...
Software developers having been calling for FLOSS for decades at this point, and it's clear that the average person will only use FLOSS if it's mandated or clearly a better product in some way. Posing a fringe ethical dilemma alone will not get it done... the vast majority of people (including people collecting data for research) do not even care a little bit. They have a long list of other problems to solve first, and if FLOSS gets in the way of any of those they'll gladly forgo it.
Casual people and scientist are different cohorts of population, casual people do not have the culture to comprehend, most do not even understand the difference between a third-partly hosted web-app and a local one just because they look at the same screen, most do not understand why it's absurd and bad print a document, scan in to an image and send the image by mail etc BUT those normally are not scientist.
Scientist normally like to learn, so if someone explain them something interesting they learn it in means.
Population always follow.
Just look at the French Revolutions the Sans-culottes was driven by bourgeois, similarly on the other sides soldiers are peoples/"commoners" driven by other bourgeois and aristocrats. The people have chosen a side or another, and they are pushed to chose by both sides. So far I do not see much on the FLOSS side since there is no community anymore and most just live on someone else computer. Who better than Scientist can correct that aim? Peoples in Humanities surely are more listening but they mostly lack enough skill to bridge the gap between the philosophy (in the classical sense of "the why") and the practice, scientist normally can.
Scientist normally like to learn, so if someone explain them something interesting they learn it in means.
Population always follow.
Just look at the French Revolutions the Sans-culottes was driven by bourgeois, similarly on the other sides soldiers are peoples/"commoners" driven by other bourgeois and aristocrats. The people have chosen a side or another, and they are pushed to chose by both sides. So far I do not see much on the FLOSS side since there is no community anymore and most just live on someone else computer. Who better than Scientist can correct that aim? Peoples in Humanities surely are more listening but they mostly lack enough skill to bridge the gap between the philosophy (in the classical sense of "the why") and the practice, scientist normally can.
This is why Nokia was gutted. Sony phones with Sailfish is the furthest separation you can achieve from the freaks responsible for this situation and still remain a participant in the information age.
People don't understand the cruelty we have grown accustomed to.
People don't understand the cruelty we have grown accustomed to.
Installed it, ran it once, found no way to close the app but phone reboot. True, old one, Pixel 3. Next step, uninstall. Pretty neat idea though.
Why is the satellite range restricted to a meter? Are the mobiles not capable of better accuracy or is it the limitation of the satellite?
The get higher accuracy requires more precise hardware / additional hardware on the receiving end which drastically drives up the cost.
Systems like this [1] which you may have seen being used on construction sites allow much higher accuracy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS
Systems like this [1] which you may have seen being used on construction sites allow much higher accuracy.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS
Is it possible to get close to centimetre accuracy without using ground stations like DGPS?
Would you get finer resolution if a GPS receiver also used an atomic clock?
I thought this was interesting - https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/#differ... the difference between military GPS and civilian GPS sounds like it uses 2 frequencies.
Would you get finer resolution if a GPS receiver also used an atomic clock?
I thought this was interesting - https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/#differ... the difference between military GPS and civilian GPS sounds like it uses 2 frequencies.
Effectively the problem is that the atmosphere (mostly ionosphere) distorts the ranges a bit. Different frequencies distort differently so you can use data from two to compensate.
IIRC, used to work in a gps accuracy firm many many years ago
IIRC, used to work in a gps accuracy firm many many years ago
I 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?
Really interesting project.
I miss seti@home.
App Login page is absolutely terrible.
Doesn't seem to be finding any data for me?
April fools joke?
Do explain how you think this is a joke. Genuinely curious.
There have been tons of fake apps that claim to do everything from microwaving food to measuring blood pressure. Not everyone knows everything about how things work in principle. I could imagine that GP doesn't know whether this is anywhere near realistic and just assumes it's a joke, maybe?
Can become very popular if they link it with some kind of crypto mining, just keep your mobile phone at window and earn crypto!
Sigh. You're putting your processing power to work for a wealthy corporation in the hopes they will give you scraps in return, and / or that those scraps will become worth more in the future.
Crypto idealism is long dead, it's all about making money now.
Crypto idealism is long dead, it's all about making money now.
Almost as good as having a crypto miner in your anti-virus software, which is practically a contradiction in terms.
anti-virus software adds so much attack surface that the joke of it beeing a contradiction in terms is almost overdone.
no crypto needed.
no crypto needed.
What wealthy corporation?
We don't even have apps to turn an Android/iOS device into a proper native webcam using UVC over USB2.0 & all attempts at RTSP/other sttreaming protocols just feel hacky & laggy.
and that's relevant how?
android dev here.
afaik newer device kernels in android implements f_uvc function for it's usb gadget interface but i'm not sure you can use this without root. so, apps can't create this functionality without root.
also i'm not sure it's works even apps can get root. i didn't tried yet because my phone not support f_uvc and released kernel sources sucks.
src: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-5.0.2_...
afaik newer device kernels in android implements f_uvc function for it's usb gadget interface but i'm not sure you can use this without root. so, apps can't create this functionality without root.
also i'm not sure it's works even apps can get root. i didn't tried yet because my phone not support f_uvc and released kernel sources sucks.
src: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-5.0.2_...
scrcpy + an app like opencamera works great for me
That's great for monitoring & setting up shots but still doesn't show up as a native device. What I usually do is hook a stream upto OBS or join via video on the phone & stay muted+silent on my laptop.
>still doesn't show up as a native device
Yeah it does. You send it to a v4l2 loopback (scrcpy --v4l2-sink) and then it shows up in stuff like Firefox or chrome as a webcam.
Yeah it does. You send it to a v4l2 loopback (scrcpy --v4l2-sink) and then it shows up in stuff like Firefox or chrome as a webcam.
Oh nice, will try it out with a clean camera feed probably from some WebRTC sample page.
I wonder how they would measure that on an android phone. Does android expose such low-level delays to the user? Is this not handled by a GNSS chip in hardware, or the OS driver/kernel?