Recent years have seen a rise in the interest of home automation and devices for local environmental monitoring. More people are now using solutions related to home science, such as weather stations. Not only does this help in better understanding of the factors that affect local environments, these solutions also offer accurate information in real-time. With the help of these home science devices one can measure what so long one could only feel and sense. Although this includes air temperature and quality, there are other things going on around that no one notices until perhaps it is too late, such as earthquakes.
The current project, the Raspberry Pi Shake or RBPi Shake, allows a deep connection to the environment surrounding you by measuring movements of the earth locally. While some of these movements may be too small to be felt, others could be big enough to set alarm bells ringing.
The RBPi Shake 4D offers all people the ability to observe unseen vibrations happening all around, including those big enough to cause people to sit up and take notice. While these earth movements do affect us somehow or the other, those serious ones often hit the news with increasing frequency. The cause for worry is these movements are not only limited to natural movements such as earthquakes, landslides, and sinkholes. Increasingly, human factors are also to blame with nuclear testing blasts, quarry explosions, fracking, and deep weel waste water injection chipping in impacting several of our loved ones directly. No wonder the Oklahoma Geological Survey acquired a 100 RBPi Shake 4D to monitor movements of the earth.
Offering a clever combination of technologies, the RBPi Shake 4D fits onto an RBPi, the most popular single board personal computer. Sorin Botirla, being a backer of the original RBPi Shake project, is also working on the present project. The objective is to develop a new and complementary web interface for all the models of the RBPi Shake.
The RBPi Shake empowers all citizen and home scientists, including hobbyists. At present, more than 1000 units are stationed worldwide in over 50 countries. This leads to the creation of the biggest citizen scientist earthquake monitoring network in history. Government institutions such as geophysical and earthquake monitoring institutes have also shown interest in the RBPi Shake project, as the RBPi Shake allows watching the effects of nearby constructions, traffic movements with changes during rush hours, and cheering crowds at local concerts or games. Within the home, it allows monitoring of the spin cycles of the washing machine, or the noisy neighborhood kid.
As suggested by its name, the RBPi Shake 4D has four sensors. Together with the geophone, there are three strong motion MEMs accelerometers giving the device a total of four recording channels. The circuit board of the 4D incorporates four 24-bit digitizers, with each sampling the movement of the earth at 100 samples per second. The data transmission rate is four packets per second, and that makes the RBPi Shake 4D compatible to Earthquake Early Warning systems.
An app on the Google play store allows seeing the data from all the Shakes installed around the earth on an Android phone.
