I designed a method to measure Seismic Activity using an Arduino Mega + a home brewed amplifier shield and a 10Hz Geophone. The geophone voltage is pumped through an amplified circuit I designed on a shield and is monitored within the sketch via an analog port. The software is triggered when the peak +/- voltage threshold is met which enables the unit to record and save the voltage readings + time in (ms) to an SD card until the reading/vibrations settle back to the center voltage reference. When the event recording is complete the data is sent to a website where it can be monitored and graphed using Highcharts. The Ardunio also sends a LAN message to my Micasaverde automation system which dispatches a text message to alert me of the seismic event. The voltage+time data is also sent up to the web server daily at Midnight where it keeps track of the last 2 days of seismic activity. The webpage containing the Highchart seismic graphs will allow you to highlight a seismic pWave+sWave in the graph to compute the magnitude in Richter and the epicenter distance of the event. The Arduino sketch also retains all the seismic data on the Ethernet Shield SD Card which can be retrieved via a Ethernet IP address. The Arduino sketch handles all the LAN traffic to view/graph single day events when the IP address of the Ethernet shield is queried. I have an .htm webpage on the SD card was well to handle the single day queries.
I have 2 extra leds on the amplifier shield. One shows a heartbeat to indicate the sketch is running and when errors are reported it will blink the error code in morse code. I also have an LED that will indicate when there’s activity detected during the day. The activity light is reset daily at midnight.
You can visit my Seismological Laboratory for the St. George, Utah area here. St. George Seismic Laboratory The geophone it self is in the ground about 6”. You can do some amazing things with the Arduino board and a good sketch. I had to upgrade to the Mega version to fit all the code I needed to make the FTP, Network Time/Query Control and Automation code work correctly. But it all works great. It’s really cool to monitor you own seismic activity. It has already registered a few small tremors!
Enjoy!
