Analyzing spring pendulum phenomena with a smart-phone acceleration sensor

This paper describes two further pendulum experiments using the acceleration sensor of a smartphone in this column (for earlier contributions concerning this topic, including the description of the operation and use of the acceleration sensor, see Refs. 1 and 2). In this paper we focus on analyzing spring pendulum phenomena. Therefore two spring pendulum experiments will be described in which a smartphone is used as a pendulum body and SPARKvue3 software is used in conjunction with an iPhone or an iPod touch, or the Accelogger4 app for an Android device.1,2 As described in Ref. 1, the values measured by the smartphone are subsequently exported to a spreadsheet application (e.g., MS Excel) for analysis.