Abstract
Given that today’s smartphones are mobile and have more computing power and means to measure the external world than early PCs, they may also revolutionize data collection, both in structured physics laboratory settings and in less predictable situations, outside the classroom. Several examples using the internal sensors available in a smartphone were presented in earlier chapters in this book (Chaps. 6 and 67) [1, 2]. But data collection is not limited only to the phone’s internal sensors since most also have a headphone port for connecting an external microphone and speakers. This port can be used to connect to external equipment in much the same way as the game port on the early Apple II was used in school labs. Below is an illustration using the headphone port to receive data from an external circuit: smartphones as a portable oscilloscope using commercially available hardware and applications.
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References
Kuhn, J., Vogt, P.: Diffraction experiments with infrared remote controls. Phys. Teach. 50, 118–119 (Feb. 2012)
Vogt, P., Kuhn, J.: Analyzing free fall with a smartphone acceleration sensor. Phys. Teach. 50, 144–145 (March 2012)
This company no longer sells external probes but a standard oscilloscope probe with a BNC to phone jack adaptor will work. It is also relatively easy to build your own oscilloscope probe (see for example https://ogy.de/oscilloscopeprobe or https://ogy.de/tastkopf).
In the original version of this chapter we used the free version of SignalScope which no longer is available (nor are the other oscilloscope apps mentioned in the original paper). There are Basic ($39.99) and Pro 2020 ($299.99) versions of SignalScope from Faber Acoustical (https://ogy.de/faberacoustical) which we did not test. We did test Oscilloscope (https://ogy.de/oscilloscope) from ONYX Apps ($9.99), Audio Kit from Sinusoid (free) for Mac OS and SmartScope (https://ogy.de/smartscope), from LabNation tools (free) for Android OS.
If the iPhone or iPad does not have a headphone jack, the oscilloscope probe will work with an iPhone audio jack adaptor.
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Forinash, K., Wisman, R.F. (2022). Smartphones as Portable Oscilloscopes for Physics Labs. In: Kuhn, J., Vogt, P. (eds) Smartphones as Mobile Minilabs in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94044-7_58
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94044-7_58
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