Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool

[nomercy400]

The fact that they can use the delay of the satellite signal to predict rainfall, is pretty impressive. It immediately links this app to more data for weather prediction, which might lead to better weather predictions.

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?

[nuccy]

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.

[imhoguy]

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.

[detaro]

> “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.

[colechristensen]

> 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.

[maartn]

Wow! But which editor approved to place an iPhone while it’s only available for Android?

[kappuchino]

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.

[hansel_der]

i suspect most ppl don't know the difference anyway.

mvp is still the name of the game.

[mshockwave]

I'm glad I am not the only person found this amusing.

[joecool1029]

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.

[mdrzn]

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.

[antognini]

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.

[lucb1e]

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.

[operator-name]

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.

[peter_retief]

Probably why I cant get any connections to my phone, from the windowsill!

[dghughes]

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.

[omarhaneef]

Used to be everyone had an FM radio and no plotter.

Now everyone has a printer, but no FM radio.

[aembleton]

Link to install the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiasa.cama...

[ochrist]

Off-topic, but why are they showing a graphic of an iPhone, if it's an Android app? (on-topic: I'll install this and try it out)

[lfkdev]

Yeah, classic editor who probably doesnt even know the difference and just search for a phone template

[mdrzn]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

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.

[Aachen]

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.

[weugek]

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.

[onion2k]

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.

[giantg2]

Is this an issue with aab files not being pulled through?

[kkfx]

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.

[ganzuul]

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.

[micromacrofoot]

it’s fairly hard to find research participants

[dantodor]

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.

[throwaway54976]

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?

[JaimeThompson]

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

[luxuryballs]

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?

[nullref]

Really interesting project.

[lambic]

I miss seti@home.

[aero-glide2]

App Login page is absolutely terrible.

[peter_retief]

Doesn't seem to be finding any data for me?

[michelreij]

April fools joke?

[Cthulhu_]

Do explain how you think this is a joke. Genuinely curious.