There's a set of articles doing the rounds over the past couple of weeks on an android phone application to turn a smartphone into a simple cosmic ray detector.
This is work done by Justin Vandenbroucke of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Centre (WIPAC), with an application called The Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory or DECO.
To turn your phone into a cosmic ray detector, Vandenbroucke explains, you need to download the app and cover the phone’s camera lens with duct tape. The phone can then be placed screen up just about anywhere, even in a desk drawer as muons can penetrate matter much like X-rays. (Muon detectors are used, for example, to sketch out hidden geological features and even buried structures of archaeological interest.)
Left running, an idle phone can be set to record images, which are then analyzed to search for particle events. DECO works by taking an image every couple of seconds. The DECO app analyzes the image and if enough pixels light up, it gets recorded as an event. Particle tracks from both cosmic rays and radioactivity in the environment can be recorded
If enough people put idle or old cellphones to use to capture muons, the project initiated by Vandenbroucke could one day evolve into a meaningful “citizen science” project.
The main page is over at WIPAC, with stories in Discovery News, Universe today and Huffington Post, amongst others.
Although this is doing the rounds now, some of the background pages are actually quite old (e.g. July 2013), such as those on the Global Sensor Web framework, and there's remarkably very little in the way of functional links describing the SensorWeb logging. Does anyone have any knowledge about the current state of this project?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by physicsmajor on Monday October 13 2014, @08:13AM
Enabling the camera, then constantly integrating long-exposure photos? That's a tremendous battery drain if I've ever heard of one. Considering every phone manufacturer seems hell-bent on chasing the race for thinness instead of standardizing size and giving us increasing battery life with every iteration (planned obsolescence sure is great), this would basically mean everyone who enables it is voluntarily trashing their battery life. Not to mention sacrificing the usage of their camera.
On old hardware this would be even worse for efficiency, considering most would have to be permanently plugged in.
I applaud the idea, but this isn't like Seti@Home. Power is a real constraint in the mobile space, and there's no way I'd ever turn this on for a phone I own.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday October 13 2014, @08:16AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by yarp on Monday October 13 2014, @11:16AM
Could the same not be achieved with the webcams built into most laptops these days? I know mine is inactive most of the time and the power drain here would be negligible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 13 2014, @04:02PM
Could the same done for any regular camera? I'm no expert that's why I ask.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday October 13 2014, @03:36PM
You missed something -- old phones that are no longer being used. No battery necessary, just leave it plugged in.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday October 13 2014, @08:24AM
Isn't that puny compared to the size of sensors that they're already using for such experiments?
And how do they control for environment - how is a muon event distinguishable from something caused by the radon in the granite below us, or whatever? TFS mentions "from both", but if you can't separate the two, you can't say much about either?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by PiMuNu on Monday October 13 2014, @09:45AM
I think that they like to see a shower distributed over a large area. So for example, they make a few detectors spread over a couple of km and then watch the cosmic showers, use the topology to deduce incoming particle energy etc.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 13 2014, @11:31AM
One interesting idea to extend that concept is I might not want to kill my battery, but I'd give up 2% of it, and I suspect the number of people willing to give up 2% is several orders of magnitude larger than those interested in giving up the entire battery or dedicate an old cell phone to running this (I might set this up later today on an old phone)
Anyway if you have 60 million volunteers willing to give up 2% of battery life instead of 1 million volunteers willing to give up the use of the phone for all practical purposes, then you have each phone do a 1 minute run every hour.
The moral and ethical concerns are interesting... its not your phone, its AT&Ts phone, or whatever. So if AT&T decided to unilaterally embed a data gatherer like this in their phones (not your phones, theirs) then sell the data, theres not really much anyone can do about it without jailbreaking.
In this "for the good of science" example I see no reason to do anything. But I envision something like "When plugged in AND battery charge > 95% then enable bitcoin mining" because, after all, they're not paying for the electricity, the phones are their property under their exclusive control, and anything mined, however little, is pure profit once the minimal software dev costs are paid.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday October 13 2014, @08:19PM
Google does this sort of data gathering already if you leave your gps on (even with the tracking history [soylentnews.org] turned off), they obtain position data periodically from a variety of sensors (gps, wifi, perhaps even tower associations) and use this to show real-time traffic just about anywhere on google maps.
The only way around it is to turn off wifi and shut off your GPS, but google can still mine tower associations, unless you shut down your data connection entirely.
And its not even Google's phone.
(Its only AT&T's phone if you bought it on contract.)
That method of carrier or OS imposed monitoring wouldn't work for this purpose because you have to cover the camera lense so that no light gets through.
Still, you have to wonder if our (justifiable) fear of data abuse and tracking doesn't get in the way of some really cool science.
Lots of phones have quite a few sensors built in, for instance my M8 [gsmarena.com] has Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, sensors. If pressure drops fairly rapidly over a localized area, wouldn't that predict some really nasty weather ahead? Might this not be able to issue alerts faster than NOAA?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 13 2014, @08:49PM
"Might this not be able to issue alerts faster than NOAA?"
Probably not. But I bet it could be more granular. Existing NOAA alerts all look like "Storm is estimated to be in the vicinity of (4 square mile city) around 5:15pm and (somewhere a bit further away) around 5:25 pm"
With super detailed data I bet you could provide crazy stuff like a continuously updated estimated countdown timer until a serious T-storm gust front will hit you. Not kinda vaguely nearly a major city, but within a few seconds of where you are. Which is interesting. Maybe completely useless, but still kinda interesting.
There's an android app called radar scope which I've used in super high res mode to watch t-storm gust fronts as they sweep toward me, kinda freaky when I can predict within 30 seconds or so when they'll hit.
A similar seismic analysis of S and P waves based on high res GPS and accelerometer data would be equally interesting... OK the quake hit "whatever" 2 minutes ago and will hit "somewhere else" in 5 minutes could be dramatically improved to a little count down timer to tell you to pull over to the side of the road when you've only got 15 seconds until till it hits. Which means the roads will be full of lunatics going 95 when the quake throws them into your parked car, but I digress.
I've occasionally wondered about high res compass data, if you averaged together 1000s of phones sitting around, if you could see geomagnetic storm and watch the waves as the propagate very quickly across the country. Probably useless, but it would be really cool looking.
If I could trust the apps and everyone else in the non-transparent value chain (ha ha not likely), I'd let an app listen for thunder on my mic and triangulate with all the other app users during a storm and let it plot individual lighting strikes on a map for all users to enjoy.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 14 2014, @02:56AM
Probably not. But I bet it could be more granular. Existing NOAA alerts all look like "Storm is estimated to be in the vicinity of (4 square mile city) around 5:15pm and (somewhere a bit further away) around 5:25 pm"
I like Granular!
When the phone in my pocket starts screaming that's granular.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday October 13 2014, @07:53PM
Then that's the same as them having a sensor 1000x1000 times larger than one in an individual cellphone. So that's about the equivalent of 2m x 3m?
Isn't that puny compared to the size of sensors that they're already using for such experiments?
Closer to 4.5 meters by 3.4 meters just using sensor sizes on popular phones [cameraimagesensor.com], such as the iPhone5.
But that would by for a thousand users, right?
If you get a million users, like your title suggests, wouldn't that be 1,000,000 x 1,000,000. so now the sum would be 4.5km by 3.4km for a million iphone5 sensors?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 14 2014, @07:20AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Monday October 13 2014, @12:06PM
So, you want us to take phones, break the camera, leave them running (investing a ton of power), in the hope that ONE DAY this MIGHT turn into meaningful science?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday October 13 2014, @03:40PM
You don't break the camera, you cover the lens with duct tape. Phones use very little electricity or batteries wouldn't be enough. Your air conditioner uses more electricity in a few minutes than your phone does all year.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by jcross on Monday October 13 2014, @12:52PM
Given all the funny business from the NSA, GCHQ and those fappening people, it seems like duct tape over the camera is a smart move. This just needs to be billed as a privacy app: the duct tape provides the privacy part, and the app checks that the duct tape is still in place and free of holes!
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Monday October 13 2014, @01:39PM
Sure. And leaving phones that aren't in active use in phones shut up in a drawer and forgotten, running all the time, with an app running that's routinely transmitting, and with access to the phone hardware ISN'T a security risk?
Screw the camera being taped over - this is pretty much an ideal case scenario for a remote audio bug.
(Score: 2) by skullz on Monday October 13 2014, @05:21PM
Darn it, if I want to participate I'll have to stop reading my passwords out loud. Or put tape / glue over the mic.