thebaldgeek

What’s in the bucket?

I started out with the seismograph sitting on my desk over night and yeah, it was a mess. Every footstep, every movement of the mouse, it picked it all up. I (thankfully) don’t have any screenshots of that trace. Trust me, it was totally and completely unusable.

Next I tried the concret floor of the garage.
It would pick up every time the garage door opened and closed and you could see Martty drive in and out.
And yeah, since you didn’t ask, it would pick up the bass of every Trance rave we had……

I put it on the back patio for a bit. Eh. It was okish.
Honestly it was too close to the house wall. If I chased Malcolm down the stairs, it would pick it up, so it was not ideal, but it was better than in the house or in the garage.
So, that said, it sat there for a good month or three.

Next up, we read that really you need to build a seismic vault for the things….. Sure, perfect would be sweet, but I ain’t got the time, money or space for perfect, so what’s the next best thing?
Stick it in a bucket.

Here it is out in the front garden.

Not much to look at really.
It’s a plastic bucket with a screw on lid buried to the level of the top of the bucket.
Trouble is, out the front garden, it picked up the next door neighbours washer / dryer…..
Less than desirable.

Here it is in the backyard.

And this is where it is as we type.

So whats in the bucket?

A Pi and the power over ethernet adaptor.
The Pi needs 5 volts DC at about 2 amps to run, I don’t want to have to run two cables out there, network and power, so you can buy these adaptors that put about 24v on the network cable at the head end and then step what ever is left down to 5v at the Pi end.
Thus, one cable doing both jobs.
Very handy.

Here is the whole show close up.
And yes, it’s not perfectly level here. That is part of the problem with the bucket, the Pi moves around a bit and it is not dead nuts level, so I have been popping the bucket lid every 2 weeks or so and making sure it is level…. The bucket was never a long term solution, so I did not bother with making it more stable in the level department…..

Ok, so that is what is in the bucket.

Bottom line. I am still not happy with the amount of urban noise I am getting, so Dad and I are brainstorming a smaller / cheaper seismic vault.

Watch this trace.

We will get back to the topic of urban noise in another blog… This blog is all about what does an earthquake look like on my RaspberryShake?

Sadly, because I have been so focused on cleaning up the urban noise, I have not been 100% diligent in taking screenshots and noting down the quakes that I have seen, so here are the few I have….

This is from a different bit of software that I can run at my house.
The plot is from the Pi and it is a small quake off the coast of San Francisco. I don’t remember what magnitude it was. Something around M2 from poor memory.

This is the M5.6 in Montana the other day.
This screenshot also shows very clearly why I want to reduce the urban noise, it makes recording the quakes a lot clearer.
This quake is a bit interesting as it shows a bigger rumble after the quake started.

This is the big M7.8 at the Solomon Islands a while back.
I really like this trace as it clearly shows the P-Waves that come (not always, but usually with the big ones) some time latter, this is the quiver of the planet from such a big shake.
The P-Waves actually come through the planet, not over like the quake.
These P-Waves are important for us to understand lots of different parameters of the quake and the planet.

I hope I get time to list some nice resources that are out on the web about all these different waves and why they matter.
I never was much for geology at school, but this thing has me all excited to learn stuff that just never made sense back then.

This one shows a very small quake (M1.6 from memory) just down the road from us at The Salton Sea.

Last one….. As I was writing this blog, I looked at the current trace and it shows three perhaps four quakes…. I have never seen that many in one hit. Just amazing on the timing.
They are all small ones, M1.48, M1.3 and M1.18 in Northern California.
But, it beautifully shows the range of quakes that I can see from my back yard. it shows how well and very interesting the device is.

As I said, its one of my favorite Kickstarter projects. I think now you can get a bit of a sense why.

BTW, The guys have another project in the works at the moment, the new one has more features and is more expensive. I would love to back it, but just don’t have the money.
Thankfully they are going to pass down to us as many of the software features as they can, one of which I am most excited about, and that is an email feature. I will automatically get an email when my sensor picks up a quake. That will make having the system a lot more exciting.