Android app uses G1 compass as a metal-detector
Here's a little Android mobile phone app that turns your handset into a metal-detector, using the compass as a magnetometer. Not super-accurate or sensitive, but possibly useful for grubbing in the beach looking for your car-keys.
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I wonder why companies don't provide an option for a few easily miniaturized sensors in a palm device. I'd certainly pay an extra hundred or two to look at sound and light spectra, pick up magnetic and electric fields, maybe an accelerometer, etc. It would let me geek out and live my star trek fantasies with a tricorder that actually worked.
Hell, I'd give a few thousand if someone can figure how to put mass spectrometry in the palm of my hand.
Hans: That would be great. My educational software company actually specializes in building activities revolving around sensors, and there are several companies that produce interfaces that allow you to plug in and swap reasonably cheap sensors for your computer or handheld. Having the iPhone or similar do it would be great.
The hardware outlays would actually be pretty cheap -- just a small three-pin connection that provided voltage across two pins and read the voltage on the third. The sensor itself would be in charge of returning a voltage corresponding to what it was sensing.
Indeed, the above hardware would also make it very easy for the phones to interface with Arduino controllers or similar.
...but it's never going to happen on any of the big-name devices, because it's a fairly niche market, and the phones already have so many in-built sensors (all of the sensors you mention above can already by done with the phone in the video, for instance -- video, microphone, accelerometer and magnetic field are all already there).
The best thing about my G1 is the wealth of "natural world" data that it can pick up, via apps or it's own sensors. I totally would pay for a "sensor blobby" add-on that gave me access to more phenomena and apps to take advantage of it.
STUD FINDER!
I can hang a paper on the wall with a magnet because I am sandwiching the paper between the nail(or screw) head and a little magnet, like from a Magnetix kit.
http://www.megabrands.com/en/customerservice/images/big_rod.jpg
Anyhow, if a gPhone can be used to detect metal, it could be used as a nail (or screw) finder, a defacto STUD FINDER!
This would be an awesome enhancement of the Level app which is quite popular with the iPhone crowd.
It actually works really well as long as you move slowly.
And what's up with the level apps on the iPhone? Why do they all need to be calibrated? The ones on the Gphone doesn't - "it just works" hah! see what I did there?
Also, there is a tricorder app on the Gphone that displays the accelerometer data as well as the magnetic field data. It's got placeholders for other sensors as well, like a thermometer, that the G1 doesn't have, but maybe the G3 would...
Maybe not quite what Hans is looking for, but this is a cool gadget: PackageTracker. It has sensors for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and triple axis accelerometer. Compatible with GPS receiver. Logs all input plus date and time to SD memory card. Has USB port, and can charge a LiPo battery through USB.
It's open source software, so you can tell it exactly how you want it to behave (wake up on detecting a fall, for example).
The idea is to put it in a package you ship and you can track how it's treated en route.
They also have the Logomatic v2, general purpose 8 channel logger board, so if you have the right sensor and interface circuit, you can log it.
Available from the cool folks at SparkFun Electronics.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8755