Acceleration of Gravity using the Doppler Effect

Live Script illustrating how to measure 'g' by dropping your phone.

This educational Live Script shows how to use your mobile phone in free fall as an accelerating acoustic source and your laptop as a stationary receiver to observe a tiny Doppler effect and deduce the phone acceleration due to Earth's gravity. The code illustrates the use of the Hilbert transform to determine the instantaneous frequency throughout a single recording of a series of drop experiments. A simulation to explore of the effects of initial velocity, impact parameter, and data filtering techniques is included.

This script may interest students and instructors of physics and related fields. 'Try this' suggestions, coding challenges, hyperlinks, and references are included for further exploration. Additional Live Scripts by the author are available here.