Crowdsourced seismic sensors might save your life someday.

Can Crowdsourcing Help?

This brings us to the main point of this article, which is to ask, is there something cheap but effective today that can be done to provide better or better warnings on earthquakes in California. And the answer here is a resounding yes, involving the same Internet of Things and crowdsourced sensors like the Air Quality Egg  (supported by our smartphone app) that we have talked about in past blog articles, but in an air quality context.

There is an Earthquake Early Warning System in Japan. Earthquake waves travel slowly (at least compared to the speed of light), and so a sensor monitored near the source of the quake can provide a few seconds warning to other parts of the quake zone. This is used, in Japan, to have elevators open their doors at the next floor (while power is still available), brake trains, attempt to shutdown nuclear reactors, halt airplane landings and takeoffs, and have surgeons stop delicate procedures.

The USGS is working on a similar system for California. (And the folks at CalTech, located near Los Angeles, are participants in the still-experimental system. The campus reportedly got a 4-second warning to take cover on the recent tremor.) Unlike Japan, however, California has a far lower density of public seismic sensors “with robust communications.” And, unlike the Japanese mobile phone system, there is no way to send a rapid alert to US mobile phones.

We’ll point out that all of the major smartphone OS providers are headquartered in major seismic areas (Apple and Google in the Bay Area and Microsoft in Seattle). It is difficult to imagine they would not cooperate with efforts to bake a robust earthquake alert system into their operating systems. (If it uses push mechanisms over existing cell data networks — pervasive in heavily populated areas — we doubt it would require changes by cell phone operators.) It probably needs to be even more robust than the existing Amber alert system Apple has added to iPhones, in that the phone should send an earthquake alert to everyone in the area even if the ringer is silenced.

The other problem is a lack of sensors. One suggestion is to use inexpensive, crowdsourced seismic sensors to supplement the public sensors. This could not only be used to provide earthquake early warning, but it would also provide a more detailed quake shake map in realtime, allowing first responders to immediately know where to concentrate their efforts in the chaotic moments immediately following a major quake.

Crowdsources Seismic Sensors

There are at least two such government-funded projects, including the Community Seismic Network at CalTech. If you live in one of their program ranges (which includes Greater Los Angeles as well as the Bay Area) you can obtain a seismic sensor for free from them. Unfortunately, an examination of their website suggests they are using older (2011) technology that is not nearly as good as the crowdsourced technology being used in more recent air pollution devices like the Air Quality Egg.

The biggest problem we see with these devices (at least the ones we were able to find on websites) is that they require a USB connection to an always-on computer to report the life-saving seismic data. In addition, special drivers need to be installed on the computers.

This is so 2011. Installing drivers is a security risk and requires Administrative privileges. Many business IT departments will be reluctant to take part if privileged software needs to be installed on their machines. (In some cases it may violate contract with clients.) It is also unnecessary in this day and age, as the Air Quality Egg and inexpensive Arduino devices prove.

The devices should be installed on the lowest-level of a building, often with a special orientation (using the supplied compass to point to magnetic north with one of the devices). Since there is a physical limit to the length of USB cables, that creates further problems with this arrangement. (The lowest level will often be a garage or building lobby, possibly far away from any computers with Internet connections.)

Applying Arduino and Air Quality Crowdsourcing Technology to Seismic Sensors

An Arduino Yun costs around $80 these days — that’s for the prototyping system, not the finished product. This is a full-fledged Linux-system-on-a-chip, complete with WiFi and USB interfaces. It can be programmed with all major web development languages, so if CalTech has already written USB drivers for Mac and Windows it should be no problem to write a Linux ARM driver for the Arduino.

Once that’s done, you have a fully working prototype of your seismic sensor together a working WiFi interface — for $80 more that what you have now. The Arduino is an open source hardware prototyping platforming. What means is you also now have the full schematics for the product you’ve developed, and rights to use these in your product. You can simplify the design (you probably don’t need the USB components since you can directly connect the seismic sensor to the Arduino’s internal serial bus, nor some of the other microcontrollers or duplicated power supply components.) The Arduino Yun is at the high end. You can get a Raspberry Pi for $35 or less with Ethernet (also Linux) — Wifi will add $10 or less to that cost. There are numerous Arduino and Arduino-like boards under $20 that include Ethernet and/or Wifi for much less than $80, including some that are designed to cut costs to the absolute bone.

Even cheaper still is what the Air Quality Egg (AQE) has done, taking advantage of some of the new mass-produced home networking mesh chips. These chips cost around $5 and can communicate via a mesh with the central home node, which is then connected to the outside world Internet via WiFi or Ethernet. The AQE uses a Nanode, which is an inexpensive Arduino-like board, together with one of these home networking chips. These chips are also being widely used by DIY home automation enthusiasts together with Arduinos or Raspberries.

CalTech could probably hook their seismic sensor up to a Nanode or other Arduino and have it connect and report data over to an Air Quality Egg, which would then rely out to the Internet. (The Air Quality Egg is also open source hardware, so schematics for their remote nodes are fully available.)

The advantage of this approach is that it is plug-and-play with an always-on Internet device constantly recording data in the cloud. In addition, the seismic sensor can be wirelessly located far away from the Internet connect, much further than the physical limits that USB will allow. And business IT departments will not need to give privileges to an unknown USB drives; the AQE or similar can be placed on an unprivileged guest network. And, finally, as the AQE proves, all of this is very inexpensive (and continuously getting even less expensive).

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