The Android Tricorder: Infinite diversity...

As per my recent introduction, I have set myself the goal of seven task-based lists of apps that are available for the Android smartphone which will show how it is suited as scientific sensor / analysis / recorder - or as it has been imortalised in popular media, a tricorder!

1. Measurement

It has always made sense for one tool to do a multitude of jobs so, when you take your Android Tricorder with you on away missions in the field, it is helpful that it can perform so many functions. If you are doing construction work it can also answer questions like...

• How far away is it?
• How long is it?
• Is it level / vertical?
• Which way is North?

Still not convinced? Say you're on an archiological expedition and you need to record the position of the columns around the Guardian of Forever? You need a Dioptra, above, a free app that basically turns your smartphone into a pocket theodolite!

2. Astrophotography

Cameras on smartphones have improved immensely in the past few years and after-market camera apps give access to photography controls that make it possible to take photographs in low-light situations previously unimaginable!

For this you need a good camera app like Camera FV5 which allows you to adjust things like exposure and ISO on your photographs in ways that your phone's standard camera can't. It also has the option to take a "burst" group of 3-5 shots which can then be "stacked" with a program like DeepSkyTracker or Autostakkert and then tweaked to give vivid, higher definition photographs of the night sky than you would have thought possible!

3. Light and Colour

What do you do when you want to repaint the shuttlepod and the original paint has gone out of production? Make guesses from a half-dozen brochures of paint chips? Or when you get a chance to see a screen-used example of Kirks command shirt and want to resolve the arguement about whether it was yellow or green?

Luckily your Android Tricorder has a number of apps that will accurately define the colour of things viewed by your smartphone's camera.

Perhaps you want to measure magnitude of the ambient light around you? You could go retro with a digital version of the old light meter you might used with your antique Olympus OM-10, 35mm film camera.

Maybe you want to run a scenario for a possible solar power installation or you want to check if you have the right tilt on your panels?

4. Naked Eye Astronomy

Whilst no one is suggesting that you should keep your head buried in your phone, there are apps for your smartphone that can make your observation of nature and the cosmos in the great outdoors even more engaging. Astronomy apps such as Sky Map, originally developed as Google Sky Map, now donated and open sourced, which can help you find your way around the night sky...

Are you specifically interested in planets? Point your smartphone skywards and Planet Tracker will give you directional arrows to guide you to the position of the planet you are looking for. Perhaps you want to see satellites, the ISS or the Chinese space station Tiangong 2?

5. Magnetometer

Perhaps the most confusing app on your smartphone sensor listing is the magnetometer ...or is it a gauss meter ... or even a Tessla meter? Whatever name it goes under, It is a sensor for measuring the strength and direction of electromagnetic forces and specifically the Earth's magnetic field to orientate the display.

What else can you do with the Magnetometer in your smartphone? Well, one side benefit is that it makes an excellent magnetic compass and can give a reading for the local gravitational field! To a lesser extent, it can be used as a very weak metal detector and they can be used in experiments to measure artificially generated magnetic fields.

Controversially, EMF fields have sometimes been linked to health issues, so finding concentrations might put your mind at ease and there are a number of "ghost-hunting" EMF meters available which are supposed to be of use in paranormal investigation. The problem with this idea though, according to my contact in the Paranormal community is that, since a phone is a significant source of EMF waves itself, the ghost-hunting apps are most probably "detecting" themselves!

6. Nature Study Journal

Imagine you have been dropped on an alien planet - we'll call it Australia! - with the express purpose of investigating new and exotic life forms. Thank goodness you have your trusty Android Tricorder with you, one of your major investigative tools.

You need to know about the weather, where you are locally, globally, on road maps and maps with information about the terrain around you. Lucky your tricorder has a compass, isn't it?

Your tricorder can also be a source of reference material. For example there are free field guide apps to Australian fauna in all states, this one is for NSW, this one is national, others are specific to frogs, and some tell you what to do if the wildlife bites you!

Your smartphone is, of course, primarily a communication tool and this makes it excellent for networking with other citizen scientists by sharing your observations with them! In Australia, Questagame has not only taken off as an engaging way of the public getting involved in environmental research, it has made significant contributions to the field of knowledge, something which inaturalist has done on a global scale.

The advance of scientific knowledge does not always rely on white coated scientists in laboratories or college professors battling through jungle waterways. In many ways it relies on hundreds of small pieces of information contributed by amateur, citizen scientists working in their own neighbourhoods.

That can be you!

7. Sensor suites

So, I have piqued your interest in using your smartphone for something other than social media? It all seems a lot of work, assembling all these tools on your phone, though. You could write such a tool yourself, using Android code but wouldn't it be easier if there was an all-in-one toolkit that gathers these sensors together for you? Say no more! There are in fact a number of sensor suites available that I know of and almost certainly more! Keuwlsoft have probably got the most comprehensive and graphically integrated set of tools. It's pretty powerful as well, it even has a Bluetooth module that controls your own hardware experiments!

There is a set of four apps under the name "Space Rocket", that might appeal to younger users, have been released by two British brothers. These not only look like instruments but they can be calibrated and you can customise their colours!

For something more technologically advanced, Phyphox is a German-developed suite of apps that takes us up to the high school / university / commercial level. It covers all the major sensors and gives user support so that you can use them with built-in experiments or submit their own to their wiki.

My choice though would have to be Physics Toolbox. The creators of this app have created a suite of tools that utilises all the major sensors, added some generators and made it so that you can record the data and transfer it via email or Google Drive so that it can be further analysed and incorporated in outside research. The app has comprehensive instructions and information about the sensors on your phone, as well as a swag of videos on their Youtube channel. It has a "Play mode" which introduces you to your device's sensors through 7 game-based challenges and simple examples of #STEM careers that use them. As you might guess, it is heavily used in education and, to support this, there are a number of lesson plans.

I hope this introduction to the potential locked up in your smartphone moves you to investigate the physical world around you with data that you have recorded and analysed yourself! What smartphone apps have you found useful? Share them with us!

The Android Tricorder, Introduction

Graphic by Nel-C

Australian National Science Week was between 11-19 August and to celebrate, here are seven apps - one for every day of the week - that will turn your Android smartphone into a scientific Tricorder without any extra hardware! You'll notice that I stipulate that I'm talking about an Android smartphone? This is purely because I have one myself and thus can test them out. The Apple iPhone has similar apps which can give it just as much utility! Certainly NASA think so: they have been sending iphones up into space with their astronauts since 2011!

So what is a tricorder and what does it do? The name ‘Tricorder’ comes, need I say, from the TV programme Star Trek - you can build your a papermodel of one designed by Suricata, a graphic designer on Star Trek Online. One early definition of the name was based on the three 'Device Input' lights on The Next Generation (TNG) tricorder shown in great detail in this great Star Trek Fact Files graphic.

All tricorders are by default configured to manage geological (GEO), meteorological (MET), and biological (BIO) functions. Each of these keys can be assigned to manage up to nine remote devices, providing the tricorder with a total of 27 different information sources.

Only having sensors for three categories, no matter how broad the definition, is a little confining, even when we consider that individual tricorders can be linked or 'pooled'. Another definition that is a little more open is based on Geoffrey Mandel's 'Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual', and repeated in the Star Trek TNG and Voyager Technical Manuals, saying that it is “a small sensor / computer / recorder (“TRI-function reCORDER”) with internal power source, drive, memory and logic banks”. I see this definition following the idea of the scientific method: it is a sensor, taking accurate readings, a computer, that analyses those readings, and a recorder, recording the analysis for future reference.

• We formulate a question – “Can we breath unaided on this planet?”
• We formulate a hypothesis - “To breath we need more than 19.5% oxygen in the atmosphere.”
• We make a prediction - “There is more than 19.5% oxygen in the atmosphere.”
• We test to see if our prediction is true – We pull out our tricorder and scan the atmosphere
• We analyse the results – If the graph on the tricorder shows that the oxygen level is over 19.5% then our prediction is true and there is enough oxygen to sustain human life.
• We record the results – In some cases the results might be communicated to others

...HOWEVER THEN...

• We make a new hypothesis and test this - “There is enough oxygen to sustain life but is there anything that will harm us? If there is more than certain percentages of known poisonous gases then we will die. We test for these poisonous gasses and if they are present at more than dangerous concentrations then our hypothesis will be proven

...and if it is disproven, we order the red shirt to be the first to take off his helmet, just to be sure!

Whilst they are not stressed in the cycle described above - hypothesis/prediction/test/analysis/new hypothesis – accurate measurement and recording are vital to the test and analysis stage and communication of these test results are what make peer review possible.

When we think about this in terms of a Star Trek science away mission, the team needs to have a defined survey scope, the tools required to make the necessary measurements, they need to record those measurements and have the tools to analyse them and, if necessary, communicate them to other groups or the ship!

A tricorder can't ask a question, formulate a hypothesis or make a prediction. Like any other piece of technology, it is only as effective as the person using it. What it can do is take measurements, analyse those measurements and then record and communicate them to it's users.

How is any of this of significance to “Everyman” or “Everywoman”? Because, increasingly, in our everyday life, we are being hit by the “Catch 22” messages of, “Figure it out for yourself” and “Don’t trust your own judgement, trust me!” In different situations, both of these could be correct and but both of them have immense problems.

Using the scientific method we should be able to replicate the experiments of the great scientists of the world. One of the bulwarks of peer review is that if researchers in France or India or Canada run an experiment and get a specific set of results, then researchers anywhere in the world should be able to reproduce their results if they follow the same rigorous controls.

You can’t do that with every piece of scientific research – do you have a cyclotron in your back pocket? No? Most everybody does have a reasonably modern mobile phone though and using this, you can follow up on some pretty complex – or pretty basic science.

We live in a world where science as a discipline is under attack, where we are being told by authority figures to “do the maths yourself” and then told to trust their analysis.

It’s true, we should be able to do the maths ourselves, to make observations and from those observations make an analysis that we can then test to refine our results. Most of us own an incredibly sophisticated scientific instrument that we only use for text messages and watching kitten videos!

We are all foot soldiers in the war over science, which side are you one? Both sides are saying that they want you to have faith in their observations and analysis. Science is saying, this is the evidence, test it, if you believe it is wrong, and have verifiable results to back it, tell us, we will change.

After all, it’s only logical.