Freerunner and Earthquakes

[Richard Guest]

Yeah, it's an interesting idea.
I read something similar on Evil Mad Scientist
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/seismometry2

The detection/pinpointing part requires both accurate detection of shaking
and timing - obviously the timing is critical for triangulation.

I think the *cool* factor for something like this would be the ability to
measure a persons actual physical experience of an earthquake. There are
*lots* of existing seismometers that will do the *fixed* point detection a
whole lot better, but none (that I know of) that will be (relatively)
unobtrusive to the users daily life and still give an actual measurement of
physical shaking intensity.

You shouldn't have to wait that long for e/q info... In New Zealand the news
media mostly regurgitate what we post on http://www.geonet.org.nz/
There's near-realtime shaking info on the front page, and if there's
actually an earthquake people can submit a "Felt Report" to tell us how they
experienced it.
It would be really cool to see how a personal accelerometer trace correlates
to the fuzzy-logic of the felt report!


End thoughts...

--
Rich

On 20/04/2008, Brandon Kruger <bmk789 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> After recently having a 5.2 earthquake here in the Midwest, I realized the
> potential in the Openmoko for detecting/pinpointing earthquakes.  What
> this
> is mostly dependant on is the accuracy of the accelerometers in the
> Freerunner.  From what I've read, Macbooks' accelerometers and detect and
> measure earthquakes fairly accurately. [1]  If the Freerunner's
> accelerometers are precise enough and it could be attached to a fixed
> ground,
> we could use GPS to retreive an accurate location and record and upload
> accelerometer data to a database.  Many different devices running this
> could
> provide intensity levels at many different locations and (at least fairly
> accurately), pinpoint an epicenter.  This data could become useful to
> researchers and would provide information about an earthquake faster than
> almost any news network would provide.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> [1] http://www.suitable.com/tools/seismac.html
>
>
> --
> ----
> Brandon Kruger <bmk789 at gmail.com>
> http://onedollarlinux.com
> BLOG - http://onedollarlinux.com/personal/
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