8 ms·

PressureNet collects 120,000 atmosphere data points per day from Android phones

82 points by cryptoz 14y ago

cryptoz 14y ago
This is my open source app that has grown massively recently. We're using the barometers in some new Android phones to build a global weather network of hopefully unprecedented scale. We just launched version 3.0 this week which is livestreaming our data to an atmospheric science researcher at University of Washington. Our primary goal is to grow the network and use the data to improve short-term weather forecasting methods. Edit: We are featured in MIT Technology Review right now: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510626/app-feeds-scientists-atmospheric-data-from-thousands-of-smartphones/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510626/app-feeds-scient... And here's our 3.0 launch blog post with more information: http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/pressurenet-3-0-sharing-visualization-research/ http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/pressurenet-3-0-sharing-visualiza...
- breckinloggins 14y ago
  This is absolutely awesome! I really love the idea of crowdsourced meteorological data. I can envision a world where every smartphone has a lower power barometer and ambient temperature and humidity sensors. Combine this with lower power GPS and you could have the majority of the world's citizens constantly transmitting basic atmospheric data 24/7. As sensors become more advanced and cheaper, one can even envision a time when smartphones also include things like air quality sensors and so forth. I can't imagine how accurate our weather forecasting would become if we had constant access to this incredible amount of real-time data.
  - seles 14y ago
    I don't think ambient temperature and humidity sensors would work very well because people usually aren't outside and when they are, phone is usually in pocket. I love this idea too though. I'm guessing pressure is one of the least effected by being inside or in a pocket, while still being highly useful for weather prediction.
    - fleitz 14y ago
      Individually you're right, in aggregate I'd expect the data to be very accurate.
      - btown 14y ago
        The problem is that the effect of being in a pocket is not zero-biased when it comes to temperature (and possibly also humidity). You'd see temperatures being pulled towards normal body temperature on average.
        fleitz 14y ago
        Yes, but in my rudimentary understanding of weather the importance is the pressure differential rather than the absolute pressure. I believe the data in aggregate will provide a pretty good map of the pressure gradient which could then be fixed to the more accurate dedicated weather stations. Think of it like the 10,000 year clock which uses a clock known to drift in conjunction with a solar time fix to calibrate.
        nieve 14y ago
        You may be right about pressure, but btown is talking about temperature and that's going to have much worse systematic bias exactly as he says. Your comment and his are nearly completely unrelated.
    - breckinloggins 14y ago
      It would be interesting to study this. I wonder if there are ways to normalize the data and still extract some useful data even if the devices are in the users' pockets. Longer term, I can see these sensors being embedded in glasses or contacts, which could be an easier problem.
  - youngerdryas 14y ago
    Sadly even if we had one sensor per cubic foot of the troposphere nonlinearity would quickly swamp any predictive value, I'm not sure we will ever have accurate forecasts past a few days.
    - mturmon 14y ago
      Right, it's generally believed that forecasting will never be effective beyond about 15 days, due to amplification of small uncertainties by the nonlinear atmosphere dynamics. Predictability is better in the tropics by a couple of days, and better in the northern hemisphere winter by a couple of days. It's worth noting that the pressures measured, even if they could be calibrated, would be almost entirely on land, and only at the surface of the Earth, not at higher altitudes (it is, of course, a 3D problem). And also, a lot more than just pressure is needed -- temperature, wind velocity, clouds, aerosols, irradiance, ocean currents, wave height, soil moisture, ...
  - crisnoble 14y ago
    >one can even envision a time when smartphones also include things like air quality sensors and so forth. How-about ambient light sensors so we can accurately predict potential solar power in a given area? Correlated with NOAA data this could be very valuable to companies looking for good solar data.
    - gus_massa 14y ago
      Luminosity/temperature/humidity inside a house or office is usually very different from the value outside. So these data are usefull for the user but not for a weather modeler. But pressure inside a house is usually almost equal to the pressure outside. So it can be crowdsourced.
  - crisnoble 14y ago
    >one can even envision a time when smartphones also include things like air quality sensors and so forth. How-about ambient light sensors so we can accurately predict potential solar power in a given area? Correlated with NOAA data this could be very valuable to companies looking for good solar data.
- incision 14y ago
  Thanks for the additional context. My thought on seeing this was "Neat. Now what on Earth is this information is useful for?" I've always thought a herd of smartphone sensors could have great use in public safety.
- ashbrahma 14y ago
  Jacob - I just sent you an email. I manage a popular Android weather app and I think we could work together to grow your network.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  Do you have a plan to monetize pressureNET? I've been testing it for a few weeks. It's a very interesting project! Also, pressureNET's privacy settings say, "The data we collect is the location of your device, the time, and your atmospheric pressure." Is a unique device ID shared with researchers or the public?
  - cryptoz 14y ago
    We most definitely have a plan to monetize pressureNET. We're working towards that goal right now by building a customer-facing API that will allow us to livestream our data to professional forecasters. We've already seen decent customer interest, and we haven't even reached out to anyone yet - just general media coverage is showing us that there's a definite market for our data. A hashed unique device ID is currently shared with the researchers in order for them to do calibration work. We have not shared it with anyone else yet, and due to privacy concerns we would be very nervous about sharing it publicly. Removing it does remove some utility of the dataset though, so we're going to try to find another way. I'll make sure to be more clear about the privacy settings as we move forward. :)
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  I think I might have been the person who first told Cliff Mass about your app. Of course, I wouldn't have known about it had it not been for Hacker News. I'm really happy to see that this has grown so much! :) From: Aaron Brethorst <aaron@xx.yy> Subject: Announcing pressureNET 2.0 | Cumulonimbus Date: February 14, 2012 10:45:50 AM PST To: cliff@aa.bb I'm not affiliated with this project, but figured you'd find it interesting. http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/announcing-pressurenet-2/?
- cskau 14y ago
  > We're using the barometers in some new Android phones I wasn't even aware that phones with barometers existed. Do you happen to have a list or reference of these phones? EDIT: Oh snap, I just noticed the app's Play listing lists the following: Devices with barometers include: Galaxy Nexus Galaxy S3 Galaxy Note Galaxy Note II Nexus 4 Nexus 10 Xoom
ChuckMcM 14y ago
This is one of those things that really highlights the disruptive power of ubiquitous computing + sensors. I expect to see more of it in the future. I wonder if we could get Randall Munroe to do a "What if" treatment of a million people taking a picture at the same time with their camera phones pointed toward Sirius. Given EXIF data of time and GPS location, could you use that data set to create high resolution images of astronomical entitites? If they were all 5Mp cameras and you had a million participants, that is a 5terapixel image with an image surface across thousands of miles.
- evan_ 14y ago
  most of the images would be virtually identical. A million awful photos doesn't make a good photo.
  - winthrowe 14y ago
    While it appears the processing requires more hardware than cell phone cameras have, the basic technique is widely used in astronomy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      The atmosphere appears to be a problem: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/coast/handout.html http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/coast/handout.html (In terms of what each sensor can do, so it is still a problem after you solve the alignment problems inherent in a million snapshots)
      - ChuckMcM 14y ago
        The atmosphere is a problem but there is an interesting effect in computational photography [1] where you take many pictures of the same thing through interference and you remove the interference. In theory each camera could provide its GPS co-ordinates (accurate to 20m or so), the time of day (accurate to the second at least), camera orientation with respect to the gravity vector (3 axis accelerometer), and possibly the orientation of the magnetic field. The million dollar question then is how much can you use that information, and the image data, to construct a computational model of the light field as it is incident on the planet at a particular time, and from that identify and display sources of that light. Clearly you'd need a significant chunk of computer power to post process that data. But it might be interesting. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography
jug6ernaut 14y ago
Really awesome app/idea. I have been waiting for someone to do this. One suggestion, create hourly(or w/e increment would work best) maps(heatmap esk) of this data. I understand this is (probably) meant as a scientific tool for data retrieval but adding something like this would give a lot to the users of how the data is being used and what it actually means in comparison to everyone else. Great work tho!
- philjones 14y ago
  An isobar display instead of individual info points has been a goal in pressureNET for a long time. Giving the user enticing visual feedback is part of making the app more broadly appealing.
  - jug6ernaut 14y ago
    Glad to hear it. I did some work in this but plotting PM & Ozone data on an android device, I had never done anything remotely similar before and had a hard time finding any good options besides going out and writing my own charting system. I ended up using a heatmap style plotting system. Looked good but it was very hard to get the colors to match up to any particular scale. I hope you end u with better results then i did :). https://www.dropbox.com/s/7jvx3iboil7noaw/2012-04-04%2014.41.02.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/7jvx3iboil7noaw/2012-04-04%2014.41...
    - philjones 14y ago
      Ooh pretty. We don't necessarily need to match up to colours if we're going strictly with isobars. Though a heatmap style, again, would be great looking.
jonstjohn 14y ago
I love this project and the idea of linking together the sensors on so many devices. I wonder if something similar could be used for earthquake detection using motion sensors in the phone, since many phone rest on flat surfaces at least part of the day (most of the day for me). It could be activated when phones are resting on a flat surface with no movement.
- CanSpice 14y ago
  The Quake-Catcher Network (http://qcn.stanford.edu/ http://qcn.stanford.edu/) has been doing this for years with laptops and USB motion detection modules. They say that laptops are less than ideal because in larger earthquake laptops bounce around and give less accurate results. Mobile phones would suffer even more from this. I used to have QCN on my laptop (old MacBook) and the sensors were quite sensitive, to the point where it could detect footsteps a couple of feet away.
rdl 14y ago
Presumably this will matter more in places like Africa, India, etc. which lack the same level of highly developed weather forecasting sensors as the US. It seems likely low-end Android phones could be just as pervasive there at some point, and would make a huge difference to farmers, public safety, travel, etc. I'm not sure how you go from here to there.
- philjones 14y ago
  At the moment, only the newer, high-end Android devices have barometers in them. A regularly available data or wifi connection is also necessary for the data to be real-time. So, this should work just fine right now in the major cities of India and the more developed countries of Africa, but for the most part it's probably a bust. Their lack of one infrastructure mirrors another.
  - rgovind 14y ago
    In a most parts of India, day to day or intra day weather doesn't vary much. What you really need is what time of the day it will rain and if yes, how much. If this app can do that, then its great!
taylorbuley 14y ago
I've really enjoyed watching this app grow over the years and its storyline develop I remember when it launched here after a weekend of hacking when the first barometric sensors came out Edit: it looks like they did "Show HN" almost a dozen times so perhaps my first glimpse wasn't as special as I remember it being. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=pressurenet&start=10 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=pre...
zachlipton 14y ago
Very neat technology, and I think it could be of value in the developing world and sparsely populated areas, but is there that much need for this data in many parts of, say, the US or Europe? Here in San Francisco, I've got highly accurate weather stations at SFO and OAK, plus dozens of other stations on Weather Underground around the city. The variability of these readings over, say, 10 miles is quite low. Are there specific ways in which a more dense grid of barometric pressure measurements can give us further insight into weather patterns? This would be a great augment in areas where the density of observations stations is much lower. Wind speed, which does vary a lot more due to terrain and structures, would be neat to map this way, but it's hard to measure the wind through our pockets on cell phones.
mynegation 14y ago
I am planning to assemble a barometer (and ultimately gather temperature and humidity data as well) on Arduino, and upload data feed to my computer. Does PressureNet have an API to accept data from devices other than Android phones?
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Almost. I'm working on this as almost top-priority right now. There are two APIs/SDKs that I'm building for pressureNET this week. The first is a customer-facing API to access the livestream data, and this is what we have in Beta right now streaming just to Cliff Mass. We'll finish that up in a few days, and move on to API number 2, which is what you're asking for. My first step is allowing other app developers to include pressureNET inside their apps, in order to increase the value of both projects. I will follow this by accepting data from other sources as well. All of us who work on pressureNET are doing it in our free time as we all have day jobs, and this project currently does not generate any revenue. So you may wait a little while for the second part of that second API to get done. But on the other hand, we're open source, so if you're itching to get it ready you can help us out. :) The project is split into three repos on GitHub, we're going to merge the two servers into one sometime soon. https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNET https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNET https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETServer https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETServer https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETAnalysis https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETAnalysis
- bigiain 14y ago
  I've got all that working on Arduino as part of my coffee grinder data logger. Two temp sensors (ambient and burr temos), humidity, barometer, and a digital compass to log grind adjustemnts. It logs all that and motor on/off times to an SD card and squirts it out over USB. Let me know if you'd like to see my design/code. (email in profile)
caf 14y ago
What's the intended purpose behind including barometers in newer phones?
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Some Google employees have mentioned that it's there to improve GPS times. The devices already have a latitude+longitude estimate from cell towers and WiFi, and the barometer adds an altitude estimate.
  - caf 14y ago
    You would have thought that "ground level" (based on the latitude and longitude estimate) would be a pretty good starting estimate for altitude in most cases.
    - cskau 14y ago
      In a modern urban environment I think this is becoming less and less so. Living in a metropolitan area for me at least mean I spend quite a lot of my time in an Nth floor apartment, Mth floor office, and commute by subterranean subways and elevated train tracks, walkways and highways.
      - caf 14y ago
        The difference in altitude between the subway and the top floor of an apartment building isn't really very far though, when observed from a GPS satellite that's 20,000 km above you.
grzaks 14y ago
Nice project. Can you elaborate more on your plans how to achieve the necessary scale? How do you drive traffic and installs to the app?
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Thanks. Yes, we have some very clear plans on how to grow. This was a big problem for us about a year ago, when our only method of growth was by posting to r/android and r/xoom. Currently, the project has solved the original chicken-and-egg problem in that we already have enough users that our existing userbase provides enough content to be interesting to new users. We have a new method of very large growth coming up, though. There have been at least four different app developers that have contacted us recently, asking if they could include pressureNET inside their own apps. These are typically very popular apps with 1,000,000+ installs. Now, most of these users don't have barometers, but even 1% would be very large growth for this project. So there's that. This requires me to build a simple pressureNET SDK, which is a priority for this weekend. Beyond this short-term, large growth, we have another plan which is to contact local Samsung and carrier offices and hopefully work towards a goal of having pressureNET included in next-generation phones. Contacting Google is a very clear long-term goal, but I want to grow with my current opportunities a bit more first.
  - grzaks 14y ago
    Congrats on reaching critical mass already! I wonder about those 3rd party developers: what's the incentive for them to include pressureNET in their apps?
cskau 14y ago
Trying the app I saw there's an option choosing who you want to share your data with. I'm inclined to choose 'public' but in the end lack of insight into whether and/or how you do data anonymization made me chose otherwise. Care to elaborate a bit on how and what you do with the data?
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Excellent question. I do realize that our sharing options are a bit vague, and I'm going to write up official descriptions and examples to eliminate all the confusion. We have not taken any action on the 'Public' option yet, so for now that option is equivalent to 'Us, Researchers and Forecasters'. There is currently no anonymization done as our only customer so far (Cliff Mass) requires the full dataset for calibration. For the Public data set, we will look into how to deal with this - it should probably not include unique identifiers, and so we'll likely remove those. This does, however, remove some of the utility of the dataset, so perhaps there is another option. I'll make sure to be more open and clear about this as we make the decisions. Thanks for your comment.
nivertech 14y ago
@cryptoz, can you give us a raw format for livestream data? Thanks
- cryptoz 14y ago
  Yes, definitely. I'm working on it right now, actually. We're building an API that Cliff Mass is using right now, so everything is in place and working. I have to finish some features in code, document everything, ensure there are no privacy breaches, and then we'll go live with it. I'll keep you updated.

82 points by cryptoz 14y ago

This is my open source app that has grown massively recently. We're using the barometers in some new Android phones to build a global weather network of hopefully unprecedented scale. We just launched version 3.0 this week which is livestreaming our data to an atmospheric science researcher at University of Washington. Our primary goal is to grow the network and use the data to improve short-term weather forecasting methods. Edit: We are featured in MIT Technology Review right now: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510626/app-feeds-scientists-atmospheric-data-from-thousands-of-smartphones/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510626/app-feeds-scient... And here's our 3.0 launch blog post with more information: http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/pressurenet-3-0-sharing-visualization-research/ http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/pressurenet-3-0-sharing-visualiza...

breckinloggins 14y ago
This is absolutely awesome! I really love the idea of crowdsourced meteorological data. I can envision a world where every smartphone has a lower power barometer and ambient temperature and humidity sensors. Combine this with lower power GPS and you could have the majority of the world's citizens constantly transmitting basic atmospheric data 24/7. As sensors become more advanced and cheaper, one can even envision a time when smartphones also include things like air quality sensors and so forth. I can't imagine how accurate our weather forecasting would become if we had constant access to this incredible amount of real-time data.
- seles 14y ago
  I don't think ambient temperature and humidity sensors would work very well because people usually aren't outside and when they are, phone is usually in pocket. I love this idea too though. I'm guessing pressure is one of the least effected by being inside or in a pocket, while still being highly useful for weather prediction.
  - fleitz 14y ago
    Individually you're right, in aggregate I'd expect the data to be very accurate.
    - btown 14y ago
      The problem is that the effect of being in a pocket is not zero-biased when it comes to temperature (and possibly also humidity). You'd see temperatures being pulled towards normal body temperature on average.
      - fleitz 14y ago
        Yes, but in my rudimentary understanding of weather the importance is the pressure differential rather than the absolute pressure. I believe the data in aggregate will provide a pretty good map of the pressure gradient which could then be fixed to the more accurate dedicated weather stations. Think of it like the 10,000 year clock which uses a clock known to drift in conjunction with a solar time fix to calibrate.
        nieve 14y ago
        You may be right about pressure, but btown is talking about temperature and that's going to have much worse systematic bias exactly as he says. Your comment and his are nearly completely unrelated.
  - breckinloggins 14y ago
    It would be interesting to study this. I wonder if there are ways to normalize the data and still extract some useful data even if the devices are in the users' pockets. Longer term, I can see these sensors being embedded in glasses or contacts, which could be an easier problem.
- youngerdryas 14y ago
  Sadly even if we had one sensor per cubic foot of the troposphere nonlinearity would quickly swamp any predictive value, I'm not sure we will ever have accurate forecasts past a few days.
  - mturmon 14y ago
    Right, it's generally believed that forecasting will never be effective beyond about 15 days, due to amplification of small uncertainties by the nonlinear atmosphere dynamics. Predictability is better in the tropics by a couple of days, and better in the northern hemisphere winter by a couple of days. It's worth noting that the pressures measured, even if they could be calibrated, would be almost entirely on land, and only at the surface of the Earth, not at higher altitudes (it is, of course, a 3D problem). And also, a lot more than just pressure is needed -- temperature, wind velocity, clouds, aerosols, irradiance, ocean currents, wave height, soil moisture, ...
- crisnoble 14y ago
  >one can even envision a time when smartphones also include things like air quality sensors and so forth. How-about ambient light sensors so we can accurately predict potential solar power in a given area? Correlated with NOAA data this could be very valuable to companies looking for good solar data.
  - gus_massa 14y ago
    Luminosity/temperature/humidity inside a house or office is usually very different from the value outside. So these data are usefull for the user but not for a weather modeler. But pressure inside a house is usually almost equal to the pressure outside. So it can be crowdsourced.
- crisnoble 14y ago
  >one can even envision a time when smartphones also include things like air quality sensors and so forth. How-about ambient light sensors so we can accurately predict potential solar power in a given area? Correlated with NOAA data this could be very valuable to companies looking for good solar data.
incision 14y ago
Thanks for the additional context. My thought on seeing this was "Neat. Now what on Earth is this information is useful for?" I've always thought a herd of smartphone sensors could have great use in public safety.
ashbrahma 14y ago
Jacob - I just sent you an email. I manage a popular Android weather app and I think we could work together to grow your network.
cpeterso 14y ago
Do you have a plan to monetize pressureNET? I've been testing it for a few weeks. It's a very interesting project! Also, pressureNET's privacy settings say, "The data we collect is the location of your device, the time, and your atmospheric pressure." Is a unique device ID shared with researchers or the public?
- cryptoz 14y ago
  We most definitely have a plan to monetize pressureNET. We're working towards that goal right now by building a customer-facing API that will allow us to livestream our data to professional forecasters. We've already seen decent customer interest, and we haven't even reached out to anyone yet - just general media coverage is showing us that there's a definite market for our data. A hashed unique device ID is currently shared with the researchers in order for them to do calibration work. We have not shared it with anyone else yet, and due to privacy concerns we would be very nervous about sharing it publicly. Removing it does remove some utility of the dataset though, so we're going to try to find another way. I'll make sure to be more clear about the privacy settings as we move forward. :)
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
I think I might have been the person who first told Cliff Mass about your app. Of course, I wouldn't have known about it had it not been for Hacker News. I'm really happy to see that this has grown so much! :) From: Aaron Brethorst <aaron@xx.yy> Subject: Announcing pressureNET 2.0 | Cumulonimbus Date: February 14, 2012 10:45:50 AM PST To: cliff@aa.bb I'm not affiliated with this project, but figured you'd find it interesting. http://www.cumulonimbus.ca/announcing-pressurenet-2/?
cskau 14y ago
> We're using the barometers in some new Android phones I wasn't even aware that phones with barometers existed. Do you happen to have a list or reference of these phones? EDIT: Oh snap, I just noticed the app's Play listing lists the following: Devices with barometers include: Galaxy Nexus Galaxy S3 Galaxy Note Galaxy Note II Nexus 4 Nexus 10 Xoom

ChuckMcM 14y ago

This is one of those things that really highlights the disruptive power of ubiquitous computing + sensors. I expect to see more of it in the future. I wonder if we could get Randall Munroe to do a "What if" treatment of a million people taking a picture at the same time with their camera phones pointed toward Sirius. Given EXIF data of time and GPS location, could you use that data set to create high resolution images of astronomical entitites? If they were all 5Mp cameras and you had a million participants, that is a 5terapixel image with an image surface across thousands of miles.

evan_ 14y ago
most of the images would be virtually identical. A million awful photos doesn't make a good photo.
- winthrowe 14y ago
  While it appears the processing requires more hardware than cell phone cameras have, the basic technique is widely used in astronomy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    The atmosphere appears to be a problem: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/coast/handout.html http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/coast/handout.html (In terms of what each sensor can do, so it is still a problem after you solve the alignment problems inherent in a million snapshots)
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      The atmosphere is a problem but there is an interesting effect in computational photography [1] where you take many pictures of the same thing through interference and you remove the interference. In theory each camera could provide its GPS co-ordinates (accurate to 20m or so), the time of day (accurate to the second at least), camera orientation with respect to the gravity vector (3 axis accelerometer), and possibly the orientation of the magnetic field. The million dollar question then is how much can you use that information, and the image data, to construct a computational model of the light field as it is incident on the planet at a particular time, and from that identify and display sources of that light. Clearly you'd need a significant chunk of computer power to post process that data. But it might be interesting. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_photography

jug6ernaut 14y ago

Really awesome app/idea. I have been waiting for someone to do this. One suggestion, create hourly(or w/e increment would work best) maps(heatmap esk) of this data. I understand this is (probably) meant as a scientific tool for data retrieval but adding something like this would give a lot to the users of how the data is being used and what it actually means in comparison to everyone else. Great work tho!

philjones 14y ago
An isobar display instead of individual info points has been a goal in pressureNET for a long time. Giving the user enticing visual feedback is part of making the app more broadly appealing.
- jug6ernaut 14y ago
  Glad to hear it. I did some work in this but plotting PM & Ozone data on an android device, I had never done anything remotely similar before and had a hard time finding any good options besides going out and writing my own charting system. I ended up using a heatmap style plotting system. Looked good but it was very hard to get the colors to match up to any particular scale. I hope you end u with better results then i did :). https://www.dropbox.com/s/7jvx3iboil7noaw/2012-04-04%2014.41.02.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/7jvx3iboil7noaw/2012-04-04%2014.41...
  - philjones 14y ago
    Ooh pretty. We don't necessarily need to match up to colours if we're going strictly with isobars. Though a heatmap style, again, would be great looking.

jonstjohn 14y ago

I love this project and the idea of linking together the sensors on so many devices. I wonder if something similar could be used for earthquake detection using motion sensors in the phone, since many phone rest on flat surfaces at least part of the day (most of the day for me). It could be activated when phones are resting on a flat surface with no movement.

CanSpice 14y ago
The Quake-Catcher Network (http://qcn.stanford.edu/ http://qcn.stanford.edu/) has been doing this for years with laptops and USB motion detection modules. They say that laptops are less than ideal because in larger earthquake laptops bounce around and give less accurate results. Mobile phones would suffer even more from this. I used to have QCN on my laptop (old MacBook) and the sensors were quite sensitive, to the point where it could detect footsteps a couple of feet away.

rdl 14y ago

Presumably this will matter more in places like Africa, India, etc. which lack the same level of highly developed weather forecasting sensors as the US. It seems likely low-end Android phones could be just as pervasive there at some point, and would make a huge difference to farmers, public safety, travel, etc. I'm not sure how you go from here to there.

philjones 14y ago
At the moment, only the newer, high-end Android devices have barometers in them. A regularly available data or wifi connection is also necessary for the data to be real-time. So, this should work just fine right now in the major cities of India and the more developed countries of Africa, but for the most part it's probably a bust. Their lack of one infrastructure mirrors another.
- rgovind 14y ago
  In a most parts of India, day to day or intra day weather doesn't vary much. What you really need is what time of the day it will rain and if yes, how much. If this app can do that, then its great!

taylorbuley 14y ago

I've really enjoyed watching this app grow over the years and its storyline develop I remember when it launched here after a weekend of hacking when the first barometric sensors came out Edit: it looks like they did "Show HN" almost a dozen times so perhaps my first glimpse wasn't as special as I remember it being. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=pressurenet&start=10 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=pre...

zachlipton 14y ago

Very neat technology, and I think it could be of value in the developing world and sparsely populated areas, but is there that much need for this data in many parts of, say, the US or Europe? Here in San Francisco, I've got highly accurate weather stations at SFO and OAK, plus dozens of other stations on Weather Underground around the city. The variability of these readings over, say, 10 miles is quite low. Are there specific ways in which a more dense grid of barometric pressure measurements can give us further insight into weather patterns? This would be a great augment in areas where the density of observations stations is much lower. Wind speed, which does vary a lot more due to terrain and structures, would be neat to map this way, but it's hard to measure the wind through our pockets on cell phones.

mynegation 14y ago

I am planning to assemble a barometer (and ultimately gather temperature and humidity data as well) on Arduino, and upload data feed to my computer. Does PressureNet have an API to accept data from devices other than Android phones?

cryptoz 14y ago
Almost. I'm working on this as almost top-priority right now. There are two APIs/SDKs that I'm building for pressureNET this week. The first is a customer-facing API to access the livestream data, and this is what we have in Beta right now streaming just to Cliff Mass. We'll finish that up in a few days, and move on to API number 2, which is what you're asking for. My first step is allowing other app developers to include pressureNET inside their apps, in order to increase the value of both projects. I will follow this by accepting data from other sources as well. All of us who work on pressureNET are doing it in our free time as we all have day jobs, and this project currently does not generate any revenue. So you may wait a little while for the second part of that second API to get done. But on the other hand, we're open source, so if you're itching to get it ready you can help us out. :) The project is split into three repos on GitHub, we're going to merge the two servers into one sometime soon. https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNET https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNET https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETServer https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETServer https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETAnalysis https://github.com/JacobSheehy/pressureNETAnalysis
bigiain 14y ago
I've got all that working on Arduino as part of my coffee grinder data logger. Two temp sensors (ambient and burr temos), humidity, barometer, and a digital compass to log grind adjustemnts. It logs all that and motor on/off times to an SD card and squirts it out over USB. Let me know if you'd like to see my design/code. (email in profile)

caf 14y ago

What's the intended purpose behind including barometers in newer phones?

cryptoz 14y ago
Some Google employees have mentioned that it's there to improve GPS times. The devices already have a latitude+longitude estimate from cell towers and WiFi, and the barometer adds an altitude estimate.
- caf 14y ago
  You would have thought that "ground level" (based on the latitude and longitude estimate) would be a pretty good starting estimate for altitude in most cases.
  - cskau 14y ago
    In a modern urban environment I think this is becoming less and less so. Living in a metropolitan area for me at least mean I spend quite a lot of my time in an Nth floor apartment, Mth floor office, and commute by subterranean subways and elevated train tracks, walkways and highways.
    - caf 14y ago
      The difference in altitude between the subway and the top floor of an apartment building isn't really very far though, when observed from a GPS satellite that's 20,000 km above you.

grzaks 14y ago

Nice project. Can you elaborate more on your plans how to achieve the necessary scale? How do you drive traffic and installs to the app?

cryptoz 14y ago
Thanks. Yes, we have some very clear plans on how to grow. This was a big problem for us about a year ago, when our only method of growth was by posting to r/android and r/xoom. Currently, the project has solved the original chicken-and-egg problem in that we already have enough users that our existing userbase provides enough content to be interesting to new users. We have a new method of very large growth coming up, though. There have been at least four different app developers that have contacted us recently, asking if they could include pressureNET inside their own apps. These are typically very popular apps with 1,000,000+ installs. Now, most of these users don't have barometers, but even 1% would be very large growth for this project. So there's that. This requires me to build a simple pressureNET SDK, which is a priority for this weekend. Beyond this short-term, large growth, we have another plan which is to contact local Samsung and carrier offices and hopefully work towards a goal of having pressureNET included in next-generation phones. Contacting Google is a very clear long-term goal, but I want to grow with my current opportunities a bit more first.
- grzaks 14y ago
  Congrats on reaching critical mass already! I wonder about those 3rd party developers: what's the incentive for them to include pressureNET in their apps?

cskau 14y ago

Trying the app I saw there's an option choosing who you want to share your data with. I'm inclined to choose 'public' but in the end lack of insight into whether and/or how you do data anonymization made me chose otherwise. Care to elaborate a bit on how and what you do with the data?

cryptoz 14y ago
Excellent question. I do realize that our sharing options are a bit vague, and I'm going to write up official descriptions and examples to eliminate all the confusion. We have not taken any action on the 'Public' option yet, so for now that option is equivalent to 'Us, Researchers and Forecasters'. There is currently no anonymization done as our only customer so far (Cliff Mass) requires the full dataset for calibration. For the Public data set, we will look into how to deal with this - it should probably not include unique identifiers, and so we'll likely remove those. This does, however, remove some of the utility of the dataset, so perhaps there is another option. I'll make sure to be more open and clear about this as we make the decisions. Thanks for your comment.

nivertech 14y ago

@cryptoz, can you give us a raw format for livestream data? Thanks

cryptoz 14y ago
Yes, definitely. I'm working on it right now, actually. We're building an API that Cliff Mass is using right now, so everything is in place and working. I have to finish some features in code, document everything, ensure there are no privacy breaches, and then we'll go live with it. I'll keep you updated.