I found a post for this on wxforum.net and thought I would post it here. It looks like a great project to get involved in. It is set up as a BOINC project by Stanford University but, it is not cpu intensive like the other projects. Schools are also encouraged to join. Is anybody on this forum already doing this?
Welcome to the Quake-Catcher Network
The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world's largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers.
With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.
Thanks for the feedback. I already ordered a sensor and should be getting it any day now. In looking at their stats, they already have a lot of users even though the project has only been up since Oct., 2008.
[size=83]Total hosts 622 (0.016%)
Total users 1,880 (0.116%)
Total teams 40 (0.050%)
Total countries 77
Total credit 674,448 (0.001%)
Recent average credit 91,888 (0.060%)
Average floating point operations per second 91.89 GigaFLOPS (0.092 TeraFLOPS) [/size]
I’ve ordered a USB sensor. I’ll have a play with this and see what I can do with it, in addition to uploading data to the project. Hopefully be able to parse the results to the website. I know we don’t exactly live in a hot bed of seismic activity, but we’ve had a few tremors in my lifetime.
It’s something that was on my 1-wire sensor wish-list, but I spent too long playing with my UV sensor instead, and now have drifted onto a power consumption meter for 1-wire.
Nuts! I received my sensor in the mail yesterday and because I messed around and didn’t get it installed yet, I missed my first shaker that happened just a few minutes ago. It looks like the center was only about 5 miles from me, probably on the Hayward fault.
Just ordered my sensor. I’ve always enjoyed earth science so this is something of great interest. It will work out well for me because my weather PC is in an office in the basement. Obviously this area is not as active as out west but we have had quakes in recent years and the New Madrid fault is certainly a reason for concern. Not sure how I’ll mount the sensor to the floor yet…
The instructions say to just glue it to the floor. In my case since I have carpet on the floor, I bought an L shaped bracket at the hardware store and I’m going to mount it to the wall and use some strong double-backed tape to fasten the sensor to the bracket. That way, if I need to move the sensor later on, I won’t risk tearing it up getting it off the bracket.
Thanks for the info. I also did some research on their web site and will likely just glue it to my basement floor (I have tiles down) in a location that will be out of the way. Looking forward to setting it up.
I too have thought about this but, I live next to a railway line, its about 100m away down
a 50m drop, surely this would interfere with it, its not just passenger, also freight…?
What an interesting project, we get quite a lot of minor quakes here in the UK so it could prove interesting. I also have a concern as around here there is only about 8-10 inches of earth on top of chalk and if they are digging the road up even up to 50-60 yards away we feel the vibrations here in the house, so I wonder how the sceen out this kind of stuff.
I believe that this works on a correlation principle, much like the Boltek Lightning Networks, so a localized error would be filtered out due to other seismic monitors not seeing the disturbance.
[quote author=Lucid link=topic=38057.msg311610#msg311610 date=1235300253]
I believe that this works on a correlation principle, much like the Boltek Lightning Networks, so a localized error would be filtered out due to other seismic monitors not seeing the disturbance.
Not much point in me going for one of these then as the nearest one to me at the moment is around 300 miles away. #-o
Shame really as there’s a nice active area just 60 miles from here, in the Highlands.
Thanks much for posting. I plan on ordering a sensor this weekend.