Recently downloaded the phyphox from F-Droid and thought about this while thinking about what all stuff I could do with it.
Are there any online resources about such stuff?
What all things have you(or people you know, in your locality etc) done along that line?
And not only big thigs, if you’re tracking other stuff, please do share your experience on that too.
Edit:
Sharing the github page of the app too:
https://github.com/phyphox/phyphox-android
Sure I’ll go. I grow vanilla as a side project to many other things. I’ve done some controlled backyard experiments with replication between my vineyard and another in my community to look at the impact of temperature on growth rates.
We plan on publishing but I’ve got enough day job publications going at once right now that a hobby paper is something I have a hard time justifying the time for, but the data is done and collected. We just used one and paper.
Sorry if this seems strange, but do you do data analysis? If not, I’d be happy to explore and visualize the data! It’s always interesting to me to do it.
Yep. 15 years in the trade. I even put together some cute python code to make bar plots where the bars were in the pattern of Vanilla vines with leaves in them. I just literally do not have the time to get back into it because I’m either writing or analyzing on 5 other papers at once and I’ve got two teams of analysts on other projects that I have to provide leadership for. It’s just not something I can justify spending my free time on.
It’s important to me that my hobbies don’t become burdensome so I’m more than happy to just let it sit for a time where I have a couple free cycles to write it up and publish. Well probably just get it out as a note in a local ag journal. We took the data with the intention of building a growing degree day model for Vanilla.
Cool. Thank you.
Is the process like vernalisation?
This was years ago now; I did an experiment to test various AA battery chemistries in real-world conditions to determine if the price difference was worth it. This was tangentially related to amateur radio, I first got the idea from overhearing a conversation on 2 meters.
I used rechargeable Ni-MH, zinc oxide “Heavy Duty” batteries, alkalines, and lithiums to play a lot of video games on my Nintendo Wii. (the batteries in the controller) I found that the Lithum batteries performed less than twice as long as the alkaline batteries, nowhere near worth their price. The “Heavy Duty” batteries were less than half of the alkalines but that actually made them more cost effective. The Ni-MH batteries had the shortest single charge of them all, I forget what it worked out to be the break even point.
One thing I did note was the Lithium batteries were noticeably lighter than the Alkalines, so if weight is an issue they may be a viable option.
Thank you.
I’ve used phyphox for lots of stuff. It’s great for looking at raw data from your phone’s sensors but there are also a lot of great experiments built in to the app. The university that develops it has a playlist showcasing them all, it’s a great way to spend a weekend.
Thank you
This is a really interesting thread, OP - well done, and thanks for the app recommendation
Thank you.
Are there any apps that you’d like to recommend?Obtainium, for installing phyphox directly from GitHub. 😉
I track lots of things, all the time; my body composition, performance at specific tasks… As for experiments, I’ve done a few:
- Tried to see if I could 3D print small channels and fill them with metal using electroplating (couldn’t).
- I also made a DIY ultrasound imaging device and tested it. Did actually produce some images, but it wouldn’t penetrate very far in tissues.
Elaborate on the ultrasound please
Of course!
I wanted to test whether a cheap piezo buzzer could be used as a crude ultrasound probe. It worked, so I tried to upgrade it into full-blown ultrasound imaging. The third iteration of that did produce an image, using a piezo buzzer cut in sections, a cheap FPGA, a MCU, custom PCB and mostly 3D printed pieces (acoustic lens, etc.). Aside from the expected low resolution, turned out that it wouldn’t image anything beyond about 1 cm.
I did make a fourth iteration of the device, much smaller and theoretically much better. But life happened and I never finished the coding part.
A DIY superficial USG could be super useful for emergency lung imaging in low resource centers, if you ever want to keep that project up! Check out BLUE protocol by Lichtenstein et al
I fully intend to go on with the project! Right now it’s not good enough to be interesting, but the results so far are too promising to not give it a chance.
congrats on the excellent project.
how many pieces of the piezo and which frequency of operation did you use?
how did you design/source the acoustic lens design?
seriously well done!!
Thank you! :)
I managed to get 4 piezo elements to work, limited by the FPGA. This was actually enough for some reasonable horizontal resolution since I used a phase array configuration, so the downside was the electronics had to generate very precisely timed pulses. The fourth prototype had 10 working elements thanks to replacing the MCU-FPGA duo with just a more powerful FPGA and using conductive glue to more reliably connect the elements themselves.
It was configurable to use any even divisor of 120 MHz, but in practice anything over 1 MHz would not even make it out of the acoustic lens due to the low voltage and low quality impedance matching layer. And much lower frequencies are barely useful anyways, so the true working range was narrow.
For the acoustic lens, I used the parametric design software OpenSCAD, with an equation for aberration-free lenses I had found somewhere and saved long before (will find it if you want) and the speed of sound in the different materials.
Cool.
Did you notice any trends from your tracking?
Things that others may also be find useful/intetesting?Well, one thing I’ve noticed in most measures that involve mental things (mood, performance…) is that lots of things seem to be cyclical. For example, mood is often alternating (more so in my case), but productivity and burnout also tend to repeat predictably as long as the routine doesn’t change.
Also, I’m maximally performant in tasks when most stable (good sleep, moderate mood, medication, no drugs…), but maximally productive when in a better mood.
I enjoyed using phyphox while on a plane recently. I found it fun to track the pressure and to see how it loosely corresponded to my own subjective experience of ascending vs descending.
I can’t recall any “useful” things I’ve used the app for, but I really enjoy having it — it makes me feel powerful. Like, it’s nice to think that if I did have some ideas of experiments to run, I could. It feels fitting to be able to access the sensors, because there are many ways in which our electronic devices nowadays aren’t (or don’t feel like) our own, so this feels like a small amount of clawing back power, even if I’m not using it for much.
I keep track of prices in cost per kg (or liter) so I am not fooled by shrinkflation and so that I know when a good sale is, without having to remember all prices. Basically just have a giant spreadsheet with the numbers.
Cool.
If possible, could you share your inferences from it?
Like how the prices of products are connected or which product is affected most/least?I don’t really run analysis on the numbers. I just use them when I’m shopping to see if a price is good or not.
I have noticed that at least here in Denmark, it never makes sense to buy butter if it’s not on sale, and some sales are still priced badly.
So butter is expensive in Denmark? What is your baseline?
The good price is 60 DKK per kg, though that price is rare. 80 is more realistic and common.
Where did you get that 60 dkk number from? If 80 is common wouldn’t that be the baseline?
I write down the best price I’ve seen, so it’s not necessarily a common price. But I feel like the lowest price something has been sold for recently is a good baseline to compare sales against.
Probably not the answer you are looking for, but I run a ton of math on gaming. Doninos, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering exct. I used to play in a lot of tournaments. Not professional, I do not want that stress. But, I usually placed top 4.
Cool. What is it like?
Is it like finding a optimized solution?Yeah. All games tend to be games of probability and statistics. Once you figure out how to do the math, then comes testing and experimentations.
I checked out phyphox and it’s so cool. Gonna show this to my wife who is a high school science teacher. Young students love running experiments like these. When you give a curious mind a tool to measure the world with, and set them loose, good things happen. Thanks!
I build an off-grid solar power set on my back yard and tracked it’s results for two years. It was only 500W in 3 directions (east, south and west)
It first charged the batteries and then used the rest to heat water if no direct use was present.
Learned a lot and noticed that many ideas and mental images about it were bullshit. Still usefull if applied to right applications.
Not gonna buy a bigger set and will use the existing ones to just heat water till they give up.
Care to elaborate on the bullshit?
Thank you.
Learned a lot and noticed that many ideas and mental images about it were bullshit.
What were the main ones?
Some relatives of mine have been thinking about rooftop solar and had talked about it to me too. Didn’t comment much, other than generic talking points of warranty, on whether is on or off-grid etc.
Not sure if my “notes” apply unless we share similarities in geographic and market.
Backgroud:
- 1\3 of my country is in the arctic circle
- During summer sun hardly sets, during winter is hardly rises (up nort, not at all)
- Energy is produced mainly with Nuclear (main bulk), hydro, wind, solar (lately on the rise), coal (transfered to backup)
- it doesn’t get hot, so cooling is rarely needed during summer,
- from may to september electricity is mostly dirt cheap. Nickle and dime stuff. It has even been negative. During winter it’s quite expensive.
- most panel systems here use some amount directly but sell most of their production to the grid and then buy it back when there’s not enough own production. No batteries involved. Energy broker takes a cut and so does the grid company.
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Salesmen that have come to my door to sell panel sets use annual average energy price and even that has been exaggerated. It totally ignores that you will be producing most when energy price is lowest. Their sales pitch calculations are designed to be hard to follow and then they rub the wonderous estimates in your face. You can’t base a reclamation on unrealized results.
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People who say that they have saved a ton of money with panels are usually those who have had fixed value pricing and totally ignore the fact that they would have saved most of it during summer time having energy market based pricing, which they now need to have in order to sell their solar juice to the grid and later buy it back. They of course suffer during the winter, but ignore that because that “has nothing to do with panels” (because it’s dark and panels are covered in snow.
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If I’d been connected to the grid, counter-intuitively the panels facing West would the most usefull, not the ones facing South, because they were active when I used the most. In our market the more you can use your own production the better and this high North sun is still somewhat usefull late in the evening.
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If off-grid, lithum based batteries seem to be the only viable option. They are however a fire hazard. Up here if you store them outside, you need to insulate the space and keep it above freezing from December to March and that takes energy, when it’s most expensive. You can dismantle your battery setup and store them unconnected more safely indoors, but that is not for the layman.
This is becoming too long I’ll add more later
Thank you
What kind of heating element did you use for the water? What type of control system to send power to it?
I’m using 220V/6kW heating element. When used with 60VDC directly from the panels, it’s about 0,45kW. No need for control system, since that is too weak to bring the water to boil. It’s function is just to decrease the consumption of heating oil. Oil burner is set to start at eavening just before enyone needs hot water and panel output goes down. Oil burner heats the water in the tank to 80ºC. It’s about 40-60ºC next morning when the sun rises, depending on the consumption.
Did you manually switch it on once your battery storage was full?
At first yes, and I was planning to put raspberry + HAL-sensor + relay to handle the switch when average current to the batteries lowered, but to my surprise batteries charged enough with both connected. Battery charge controller is right next to the panels and there is some distance to the heating element. It appears that the MPPT battery charge controller so much lower resistance path that the current favors it.
My test setup only has 300Ah of battery, capacity at 12V, so it’s charged quite quickly. Battery power only runs living room devices 50" TV, monitor, laptop, steamdeck, cable modem that are used about 4-6h a day and rarely on at the same time.
If it’s a hot summers day, I might manually direct all to AC
… or if there’s some catastrophic blackout during winter I can connect batteries to a radiator water circulation pump and heat the home by burning wood. This is very improbable, but at least there’s something.
That sounds awesome. There seems to be a bit of a gulf in investment between getting a few panels to charge a backup battery or run some devices while camping, and actually doing a proper home integration. I’m in the midst of that gulf where I can generate more than I can easily store and use later, so I’d like to find some worthwhile uses for direct use of solar energy.
Don’t know if you’ve seen it before, but here’s an interesting article about direct solar.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
A fun experiment I did recently was to measure the speed of sound with my oscilloscope. I wired up a speaker and a microphone at a known distance from each other, connected the oscilloscope to both sides and measured how long it took between sound trigger & reception. I came within several meters/second accuracy which I think is a nice result for a basic home lab setup.
I also track a lot of metrics around the house using Home Assistant. Temperature, humidity, power usage, light levels, heating, but also stuff like total meters of filament used, total objects printed, system metrics. I like statistics and it’s fun to compare months/years and clearly see the results of improved isolation for example.
Cool.
Did you notice any thing that’d useful/interesting for others? Or anything that you think others should start to track too?
For the average household I think tracking your energy and gas consumption is most useful as it allows you to spot accidental wasteful usage and both save money and the environment :)
Indeed. Thank you.
I experiment with everything all the time. Try new approaches to things, see what worked and didn’t, adjust and try again. Cooking, exercise, social interactions, lovemaking, if I can evaluate it I run little informal experiments on it all the time.
Best quantitative example is exercise. I track lots of cardio metrics with my gps+HR watch so I can see in real time what I am doing to my pace vs heart rate. I track my estimated 1RM for various lifts across different training programs and methodologies and have found one that produces the best results for me. My watch also tracks sleep and I’ve found that 2 drinks affects my sleep while 3 drinks wrecks my sleep.
Awesome.
Which all training programs were the better ones?
I lifted seasonally, phasing from 3 lifts and one cardio day in the winter to 3 cardio and 1 lifting day in the summer. Each fall was a bit of a reset, jumping back in at lower weight and working my way back up.
For me 5/3/1 is where it’s at. I started with 5x5 and plateaued out pretty quick particularly on OHP but I stuck with it for 2 years. From there I tried a variant that was 3x5 and amrap sets, I forget what it was called. That was only marginally better, tried it for two years.
From there I found 5/3/1. I was able to improve my 1RM in each lift beyond what I ever hit and the best part is I still improved year over year, so it has a much more gradual plateau.
Thank you
Nothing serious, but I track all the games I play. According to stats, I completed 30 games and spent a total of 4d 15h 32m playing games this year.
- Whenever I change something in my coffee setup, I do blind tastings for myself and sometimes others.
- Scrum retrospectives and Kaizens in a way are experiments to see how to improve 🤷♂️
- I regularly answer ACT-Advisor questions to see how I’m doing over time https://stevenchayes.com/tools/
Thank you
Did you find any significant factor from the tests? Please do share them, if possible. Or was it done to ensure that the quality is consistent?
Sure! I’m assuming you’re talking about coffee. I aim to get the best coffee possible as cheap as possible, so these factors are by far not optimized but they’re good enough for me:
- Coffee beans: Getting coffee that you like is maybe the most important factor. The first time I tried floral coffee, I thought my cup was not properly washed and still had detergent in it. Now I know I don’t like floral coffee!
- Water: I hate myself for doing this because of the plastic waste I generate, but buying a massive container of water that has been purified by reverse osmosis consistently results in way better coffee than using my tap water.
- James Hoffman’s V60 recipe v.s. Osmotic flow: James Hoffman’s V60 recipe is a thousand times better. I think the main factor here is agitation; in this case, more is better. I have not experimented much beyond Hoffman’s recipe because I like it. It’s possible I could optimize a bit more with little cost.
- The cheapest grinder my partner used in their previous place v.s. the grinder we recently bought: I am so sorry if I sound like a snob, but getting a grinder that is capable of creating uniform grinds has been game changing. It’s not even close.
The way that I think about these factors is that I’m affecting the extraction of the coffee. I’m trying to take the things that taste good in coffee and leave the things that don’t taste so good. I’m playing a balancing game: not too extracted and bitter, not too underextracted and insipid.
Of course, there are other variables that I could try to optimize for, such as body, acidity, sweetness, etc… Maybe I will someday pay attention to it, and if it’s not expensive or hard to optimize for them, then I’ll be happy to change my way of making coffee. In the meantime, I’m happy with what I’ve got.
In the off chance you meant Scrum and ACT-Advisor stuff:
- In Scrum, I’d say a lot of the experiments end up affecting factors that have, in the literature, already been identified as important: happy workers are more productive, stable interfaces between teams leads to faster development and higher quality work, cross-functional teams are better than having handoffs, etc…
- As to the ACT-Advisor stuff, this may seem obvious, but doing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy improves my scores. I like to see that it’s not only therapy sessions that improve the scores, but also weeks of intensively doing ACT exercises on my own.
Thank you
They have some demos on their website
