Anyone have any good projects for earthquake detection?

[Some Anon Guy]

Anyone have any good projects for earthquake detection?
Looking at setting something like this up at the house.
Just wondering if anyone has and write ups, books, sample code, projects (PIC, AVR, or ARM) for detecting earthquakes.
I have a few geophones, but they are expensive...

Id like to do this with accelerometers or something like that...

[CocaCola]

Have you Googled up DIY seismometers?  Lots of hobby level micro based ones out there to be experimented with...

All sorts of sensing ideas, look at this dead simple and cheap detection circuit...

http://sydney.edu.au/science/uniserve_science/school/Seismograph/detector/index.html

[Some Anon Guy]

Yes, lots of good info out there via google.

I am looking for something like what the guys over here are doing...
http://qcn.stanford.edu/

Anyone have any info on these devices?

[bigtoy]

All I could find was "MEMS sensors" so they appear to be based on silicon accelerometers. Which is not terribly helpful I admit.

[user77]

I'm sorry but I know only an italian project by Nuova Elettronica, the LX1358, it's a vertical seismograph with an digital interface for connect to pc Lx1500, it's amatorial project but it's nearly a professional instrument.

If you want just to measure something but without accurate segnal, you can weld little cupper pendulum to an piezoelectric disc (normally used as buzzer) and mesure the output. The principle of function is this, when the mass on otherside of pendulum is moving the disc will be flexed and the quartz on this give you an signal. All depende from the piezoelectric disc's caracteristics, lengh of pendulum and the mass on pendulum.
It's a very cheap method and works, depends from what you want.
You can try to googling "piezoelectric disc seismograph"

Bye
Max

[cadence]

Check out page 26 of the current (June 2014) issue of Elektor magazine.

http://www.sonsivri.to/forum/index.php?topic=526.msg162505#msg162505

Uses a piezoelectric sensor from Measurement Specialties (meas-spec.com).

[cadence]

You may also want to check out the DIY seismograph on page 32 of the May 2012 issue of Nuts & Volts magazine.

http://www.sonsivri.to/forum/index.php?topic=2140.msg131256#msg131256

Similar sensor, different implementation.

[LabVIEWguru]

Anyone have any good projects for earthquake detection?
Id like to do this with accelerometers or something like that...

I saw this on Ebay today - they look really interesting (and cheap)

search for:

801S Highly Sensitive Vibration Sensor

At $2.50 USD they are cheap enough to experiment with.

Good luck.

[cusna]

For me is better to use an accelerometer chip type ADXL335
or  ADXL345 I2C

[pablo2048]

For me is better to use an accelerometer chip type ADXL335
or  ADXL345 I2C

Do you have any example with those chips? I think that the sensitivity and noise of ADXL335 is way below required range (see for example this https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/235 ). So without heavy digital filtering or something like that is useless...

[cusna]

I do not think it takes a great filtering,
the important thing is to fix the sensor in a point
strategic, rock, not near roads.
You can also add the rubber shock absorbers.

Here you can see a video where they used arduino to check the operation
of the sensor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55cD7ldxCUg

Posted on: July 24, 2014, 12:01:36 12:01 - Automerged
Here using piezo transducer:
http://www.ijeemc.com/January2013/1.pdf
but I do not like 

[pablo2048]

IMHO that video shows actually nothing - everyone knows what is accelerometer built for, but there is significant difference between showing raw accelerometer data and measuring earthquake intensity (and of course filtering false alarms)...

[Some Anon Guy]

Currently I have an accelerometer in the unit right now. (I have ordered one of the devices LabVIEWguru was talking about just to check them out)
I also have a 3 geophones that I can use (They are expensive though).

I read an interesting article that someone was capturing earthquake data using an accelerometer and using the vector sums to make inferences about the earthquake.

I think that this approach will work for my project as I do not need to know the exact measurements, just need to be able to trigger on a threshold.

I have been really busy on other paying projects and have not been able to dedicate any time on this one... :/

Ill update you when I can actually work on it.

[cusna]

I am interested in 'article with geophones, can you give me the link?
Thanks

[pablo2048]

I am interested in 'article with geophones, can you give me the link?
Thanks

Links from my diary (i've tried to build this few years ago, but with no luck - probably not enough mathematic skills on my side...)
https://www.crewes.org/ResearchLinks/GraduateTheses/2008/Hons-MSc-2008.pdf
http://www.sercel.com/products/Lists/ProductPublication/Sercel-digital-geophone.pdf

[LabVIEWguru]

I ran across a book today: "Vibration Monitoring, Testing, and Instrumentation"

While not directly applicable, I'll bet there is a lot of basic science you can use in your project.

Link is attached. If you aren't interested, no problem.

[cusna]

I can not open the link,you can check?

[LabVIEWguru]

The 1st link still works for me, but here is a second - give this a try.

[pablo2048]

I go to dig deeper into this, and found this interesting paper http://www.iris.edu/hq/instrumentation_meeting/files/pdfs/MEMS_Seismology.pdf - it seems that there is no available MEMS accelerometer for Weak motion requirements (see page 12) :-(

[Ichan]

The subject is about "Earthquake Detection", it will only useful if it can detect the earthquake before it happen at detection place. Just did a little search and read about P-Wave which come earlier than the destructive wave itself, also found some cheap alarm which advertised as earthquake early warning alarm.

Any project like that?

-ichan