Using a Smartphone pressure sensor as Pitot tube speedometer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how a smartphone's barometric sensor, combined with an app and external Bluetooth sensors, can be used to measure air and vehicle speed using Pitot tube principles, showcasing customizable experimental setups.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for measuring air and vehicle speed using smartphone sensors and external Bluetooth sensors within the phyphox app, enabling customizable experiments.

Findings

Successful measurement of air velocity with smartphone barometer

Extension of experiment using Bluetooth pressure sensors for vehicle speed

Demonstration of customizable experiments via web-based editor

Abstract

In this article, an experiment to measure air velocity with the barometer of a smartphone is presented utilizing the concept of a Pitot tube. For the experiment, the app phyphox is used which has a set of useful features for performing smartphone-based experiments 9,10 . Both the data analysis tools included in the app phyphox and the remote access function to smartphones in experimental setups are used in the presented experiment. This experiment is also an example for designing customized experiments within phyphox which can be realized by any user via a web-based editor 9 . In addition, it is shown how an external Bluetooth pressure sensor can be used to extend an experiment, which is used here to measure the speed of a vehicle. Such an integration of external Bluetooth Low Energy sensors into smartphone experiments became available with phyphox version 1.1.0.