PhysTrackX is a software created by MS student Isam Abdullah Balghari and Muhammad Sabieh Anwar, under the active support of the Lahore Science Foundry project of the Khwarizmi Science Society and PhysLab. This software can be downloaded as an executable binary or extracted from Isam’s Git as a collection of python scripts. It is open source, modular, easy to use and the workflow is derived from PhysTrack, our earlier Matlab-based version.
If you are interested in a super quick howto on how to use PhysTrackX, watch this two-minute long video.
Here is a video recording of a lecture that shows the power of video tracking illustrating usage of the software PhysTrack.
Primers and software
- Primer — Smart Physics with Smartphone: This primer is a must read for anyone embarking on the use of smartphones to capture the kinematics of moving bodies.
- Primer — Smart Physics with Video Tracking: This primer is meant for the regular user of who wants to perform video tracking using PhysTrack. For example, the physics teacher who wishes to get an overview of our tracking system, while focusing on the physics. PhysTrack’s experimenter’s reference manual is meant for the experienced software developer who wishes to create new physics experiment and add new innovative features to the existing ones. It is also meant to provide help to the physics teacher who wants to edit the existing experiment examples for custom usage.
- For individual experiments, it is recommended to read through the “Student manuals”
PhysTrack and PhysTrackX resources
Other resources specific to PhysTrack and PhysTrackX can be found on the following links.
- Complete downloadable package for PhysTrack
- PhysTrack wiki
- GitHub repository for PhysTrack
- GitHub repository for PhysTrackX
- Experimenter’s reference manual for PhysTrack
- Sourcecode (without sample videos)
- Sample videos (zipped together) | Sample videos (as a Youtube playlist)
- Publication 1: Muhammad Umar Hassan and Muhammad Sabieh Anwar 2017 Eur. J. Phys. 38 045007
- Publication 2: Bilal Aftab Usman et al 2015 Eur. J. Phys. 36 065049
- Publication 3: Isam Abdullah Balghari and Muhamamd Sabieh Anwar, arxiv.org:2608.13977
- Here are papers that cite or employ PhysTrack for their tracking needs
About OCR
Here are results from an OCR tracking of temperature and resistance (of a thermistor) values acquired both from PhysLogger Technoloogy and PhysTrackX’s 3.4 OCR feature. The second image below merely shows a closeup showing the strong correlation between the two sensing modalities.
Experiment |
Code |
Tags |
|---|---|---|
| Spinner with a smartphone | 1.35 and 5.7 | mechanics, rotational mechanics, smart physics, smartphone |
| Wilberforce Pendulum | 2.24 | mechanics, waves and oscillations |
| Projectile Motion | 5.1 | mechanics |
| Sliding Friction | 5.2 | mechanics |
| Colliding Pucks on a Carom Board | 5.3 | mechanics |
| Spring Pendulum | 5.4 | mechanics |
| Vertical pendulum in phase space | 5.5 | mechanics |
| Newton’s Cradle | 5.6 | mechanics |