Using a Smartphone Pressure Sensor as Pitot Tube Speedometer

Abstract

As smartphones have become a part of our everyday life, their sensors have successfully been used to allow data acquisition with these readily available devices in a variety of different smartphone-based school experiments. Such experiments most commonly take advantage of the accelerometer and gyroscope. A less frequently used sensor in smartphone-based experiments is the pressure sensor or barometer. Pressure sensors in smartphones can improve indoor navigation, for example in multi-story shopping malls. In a popular smartphone experiment, the barometer is used to determine the current altitude in an elevator with the barometric height formula. Along with accelerometer data and by deriving the height data to calculate the velocity, z( t), v( t), and a( t) plots can be generated and shown to students in real time.