A Personal Seismograph - Raspberry Shake

Angel Rodriguez has special love for Earth exploration with seismography and vibrations. He had a hard time finding a simple, portable and easy on pocket seismograph. The best solution he devised for the problem was a Raspberry Shake, a personal seismograph that could be used by all earth science enthusiasts. The best thing about this seismograph is that it works with all kinds of Raspberry Pi systems be it B, B+, 2B or 3. It has been programmed in a way that even the future versions of Raspberry Pi will find compatibility with it.The Shake goes very well with all other kind of single computer boards, just connect these system with RS232 TX/RX port, modify those a bit, and you are good to go.

The Shake is constituted by a amplifier, ARM processor, digitizer, and a geophone. The geophone generates current from a magnet and thin coil located in a metal can. According to the campaign page geophone will function normally if the system has a frequency of 4.5Hertz and a coil with a resistance of 380 ohms. The amplifier would take in the current and sent it to the processor in a digitized form. It is the processor that sends the current to the Raspberry Pi unit a bit later. The Pi accepts the processor data and changes it into an ideal seismograph data.

Raspberry Shake allows the user to see the data in real time as well as from a distant location. The unit can always be kept in a quiet location where data is accessible to the user 24/7. The data gets stored in a Standard for the Exchange of Earthquake Data (SEED) format and is then shared with the help of Shake’s official website. Data can always be dumped to the user as the spectrogram or a helicorder or be sent in form of email or telegram.

The instrument is capable of registering an earthquake up to a magnitude of 2.0 within a range of 50 miles radius. It can also record earthquake of a magnitude of 4.0 upto a radius of 300 miles. The short term earthquakes like that falling in range off 0.5-15 Hertz can also be recorded with Shake. The users will receive a handbook with the instrument that will guide the user about its installation and usage and precautions.