Ondes Visibles: What if the Electrosmog was Visible?

The Web of Things cries for wireless communication! As a consequence, as it is being deployed out there it contributes to a phenomena called electrosmog, understand a cloud of electromagnetic waves that increasingly surrounds us (and the exact effect of that cloud on us is still in the middle of many debates…).

The fascinating part about this cloud is that much like our electricity consumption, we can’t really see it or feel it (well except for electro-sensitive people who say they can). Back in 2007, we started working on a project to make electricity visible the Web way (Energie Visible!), hence trying to make electromagnetic fields visible sounded like a fun challenge.

Ondes Visibles! is an Android + Arduino application that I developed to help people experimenting with and raising their awareness of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). It features tutorials giving you the very basics of EMFs as well as interactive experiments for low (LF) and high (HF) frequencies using home-made sensors. Basically, we plug an LF and HF sensor to an Arduino board. Then, using a USB bridge, we route the measurements to pretty much any Android mobile phone through a USB wire (using the great Microbridge library). and visualize the data in graphs.

But enough tech, let’s have a look at what it is like:

Want to try it out? Simply build it for yourself! Get the sources and instructions on the official project page! Hope you’ll enjoy it at least as much as I enjoyed building it (code contributions are welcomed, fork us on GitHub!).