Monday, December 28, 2015

The Happy Happy Shake Meter with Magnetic Pulse Technology

This will be name of my new accelerometer with a compass chip.  Right now I'm like millions at Christmas, and got my Raspberry Pi 2 up and running.  I'm waiting for my breakout board with a dozen projects.  Soon, I'll be doing the Blinken Lights.  Reminds me of the PDP-8 I saw when I was in high school.  I won't use paper tape.  :)

In the thirty years I fooled around with accelerometers and seismometers, I've had some painful lessons.  Every time I think of some of them, I cringe.  Anyway, I learned how to make these work.  It would be amazing if I ever read that somebody else had learned this too, but nope.  The general idea is to surround OK with a bunch of hh's for the next big earthquake.  I'm going to muck around a lot, but eventually somebody is going to have to throw in some money, since it needs some server-side technology.  I'm looking at this as a kind of DropCam for seismic nerds.

The magnetic pulse thing is neat, but a very long shot.  It will use a 3-axis 12 bit magnetometer chip, but the problem is that every lightning strike will set it spinning.  I like the physics that produces a magnetic pulse 2 weeks ahead of a major earthquake.  If we actually record it, somebody may work on it.  Right now, the busgus is putting all its eggs in the stupid early warning thing.  EM technology is properly exotic, we put the sensors on the northern Polaris seismic stations, and it helps find new diamond mines.


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