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Barometers In iPhones Mean More Crowdsourcing In Weather Forecasts
cryptoz (878581) writes Apple is now adding barometers to its mobile devices: both new iPhones have valuable atmospheric pressure sensors being used for HealthKit (step counting). Since many Android devices have been carrying barometers for years, scientists like Cliff Mass have been using the sensor data to improve weather forecasts. Open source data collection projects like PressureNet on Android automatically collect and send the atmospheric sensor data to researchers.
This will prove AGW is a proof of theory concept, unavoidably.
Is this a suprise? I felt like this is a pretty obvious one. I mean, a newsworthy article would be that Apple would then use this data to induce mass climate change and natural disasters where there is a low density of Apple users to increase their market share.
"Android devices have been carrying barometers for years"
Now we see the real purpose of this article.
I read the lead in three times, each time reading HeaLthKit as HeathKit. I must be officailly an old fart...
Now with even less privacy!!!
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If it is open source (and a cursory look around the web site didn't show me any links to the source), it's a shame that it isn't in F-Droid.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I know what they're going through. I had my last apple years ago. These days, when I find one, I toss it back over the fence.
to implement the anal probe functionality. I know the idea is rather old at this point. Clearly the populace is not vocally butt-hurt enough just yet about the lack of privacy, or maybe they are and we just need the data about their sphincter tightness... in the cloud aggregate database gathered by the APF module.
Yay! We can finally all figure out what the average weather inside teenagers pockets is! Woot!
Remember Barometers In iPhones.. that's iPhones.. remember Barometers In iPhones.... Smallprint: oh yeah, Android had them for years
If you get the chance to monitor the barometer at high frequency there are a couple neat atmospheric phenomena which you can observe.
The shockwaves which preceed an oncoming strong front or thunderstorm are especially cool to watch.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I know my android device has a barometer, but I can't seem to figure out why. Sure it's kind of neat to be able to see the pressure graphed over time, but I don't think it's a big selling point on devices. Is it just a side effect of some other hardware that makes it easy to implement or something?
Every time I feel a small breeze or change in air pressure or a bit of a temperature change I feel also tracked ... somehow is behind me ... I'm sure! I can feel it!
Or is it just my developing proximity sense?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It was originally put in to aid in altitude adjustment as the GPS isn't so good at that. A nice side effect is the ability to look at large numbers of pressure readings across populated areas.
so since they have an accelerometer, gyro, compass (orientation), GPS (position), and now even barometer and temperature sensor (reasonably accurate altitude w/ high update rate), all they're missing is a few PWM outputs to directly fly a plane, helicopter, or multirotor as a full-blown auto pilot. I know it's peanuts to interface an MCU with an android phone over UART over USB, but i'm guessing it is also possible on iShizzle, be it over some proprietary interface as opposed to plain old TTL UART. Let's see how long it takes before the first iPhone "drone" kits arrive in the store.
Welcome to the 21st Century Apple users! (Android users have been here a while.)
Yes, we know. We're glad we have arrived so we can show the primitives here all the cool stuff you owned and beat against rocks, actually doing things for people (See Also: NFC, BTLE).
One of the things Apple is using the barometer for is to determine what floor you may be in within a building.
It could be that with central heating/cooling in most buildings running almost all the time, perhaps a barometric reading could be constant between floors from day to day, even as weather changed...
Or perhaps just using the change along with accelerometer data to detect shifting between floors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Our lab rooms have negative internal pressure with respect to the halls on account of fume hoods, etc. Wonder if a phone barometer gets confused by that?
A big problem here is that many office buildings are pressurized above atmospheric. People taking their phones in and out of the building should make for interesting weather forecasts as the "observed" pressure abruptly rises and falls.
I wonder how long it will take someone to turn this into a secondary (and insecure) microphone. It's already been done with Android's gyroscope.
Am I the only one who drops the "l" from HealthKit and reads it as HeathKit? Yes, I know I'm showing my age. Now get off my lawn!
Now that they have a barometer... just need to add air motion sensors, a humidity sensor, a thermometer, vibration sensor, UV sensor, and an air quality sensor / airborn particles measurement, Oh yeah, and an Ebola/Microbe detector
I know several people who get barometric migraines, or migraine headaches that are triggered when the pressure changes suddenly (usually when it drops). Some of them have told me that migraine medications like rizatriptan and sumatriptan can be effective, but often come with unpleasant side-effects like a racing pulse or grogginess.
This leads to a dilemma: do you take the medication and deal with the side effects, or do you try to ride out the headache? It's especially frustrating for people who get headaches that aren't always migraines, because the migraine medication doesn't necessarily work on a normal, non-migraine headache.
This is where a personal barometric pressure monitor that's been with you for the last few hours can be very helpful. If you are trying to decide whether or not to take migraine medication, you can consult your phone and see if you personally experienced a large pressure drop prior to the onset of the migraine. If so, that helps with the decision of whether or not to take the medicine.
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