PROJECT MAGNET turns an iPhone into a field instrument. It learns the magnetic character of wherever you're standing, watches for departures from it, and records what it measured — the shape, the strength, the place, and the moment.
A magnetometer reading taken indoors is rarely the textbook Earth field. It carries the building, the wiring, the device's own magnets — an offset that can put the number three times higher than a physics lesson would suggest. Declaring "anything above X is an anomaly" is therefore useless.
So PROJECT MAGNET measures the field where you are, treats that as normal, and reports departure from it. That one decision is what makes the instrument work in a basement, a field, or a parking lot without being retuned.
Seven stages, each doing one job. The design is deliberately conservative: every stage is inspectable, and nothing is discarded that a future algorithm might want.
The dial shows distance from normal, with the trigger threshold marked at its midpoint. Green left, red right — readable at arm's length, in sunlight, in motion.
Haptic pulses that quicken as you close on a target. The instrument can be read through your hand, so your eyes stay on the ground.
Every event stores the seconds before, during and after it — including the approach. An observation is a shape you can re-examine, not a number you have to trust.
Amplitude against the local noise floor, persistence, consistency, prominence. Every component is shown, because a score you can't interrogate is decoration.
Observations plotted as graduated discs — area by strength, colour by confidence. Recurring sites and strong finds are visible before you tap anything.
Every internal value, live: raw, smoothed, baseline, delta, noise floor, dwell counter, detector state. The instrument you need to tune the instrument.
A large reading establishes that an unusual magnetic field was present. It does not establish what produced it, and the app never pretends otherwise. Events are classified by the shape of the signal — spike, sustained, oscillation — never by a guess at their cause.
Your precise locations are yours. They stay on your device. Anything contributed to a shared network in future will carry approximate position and an anonymous identifier — never your identity, never your exact movements.
Today's detection algorithm is not the last one. Raw measurements are preserved alongside processed ones, and every event keeps its waveform, so observations recorded this year can be re-analysed by a better method later.
One phone reporting something unusual is a curiosity — it could be a case magnet, a passing vehicle, a speaker. Several independent devices reporting it in the same place at the same time is evidence. That distinction is the whole design of what comes next.
An instrument that overstates itself is worse than no instrument. Here is the honest state of the work.
A single magnetometer in a single pocket is a personal instrument. Many of them, reporting independently, become something else: a way to tell a local quirk from a real regional event.
The design constraint is stated up front. Contributions carry approximate location and a rotating anonymous identifier. Nothing published identifies a person or traces a movement. Individual spikes are not headlines — the network's value is in agreement between independent observers, not in amplifying every reading.
Detection, event recording with waveform signatures, mapping, confidence scoring, diagnostics, export.
The tuning campaign the constants have been waiting for: measured noise floors, adaptive thresholds, motion discrimination, real detection ranges.
Anonymous, approximate, aggregated contribution. Multi-device corroboration as the basis for elevating confidence.
Regional activity over time, recurrence at known sites, and the tools to look back through it.