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.<p>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?
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: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.location.gps.gnsslogger&gl=US" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...</a><p>I recommend turning on Force Full GNSS measurements in android developer settings if you're going to try messing with it.
Tangentially related, but there's another cool app that turns your phone into a cosmic ray detector: <a href="https://cosmicrayapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cosmicrayapp.com/</a><p>It turns out that cosmic rays pass through your phone more frequently than you might expect.
Interestingly the app is made in Unity. A couple of oddities, but having this leader board function was definitely an interesting idea.<p>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.
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.
Link to install the app: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiasa.camaliot" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiasa.cama...</a>
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.
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?<p>> As well as helping to create new Earth and space weather forecasting models, participants are also in with the chance to win prizes<p>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?<p>Edit: sent them an email using the address on the contact page. Let's see.
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.<p>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.
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?
We don't even have apps to turn an Android/iOS device into a proper native webcam using UVC over USB2.0 & all attempts at RTSP/other sttreaming protocols just feel hacky & laggy.