Earthquake alarm successfully assembled

With the rapid development of the world, earthquakes and other natural disasters have also become more frequent. Due to the high degree of integration, the current earthquake early warning system requires seismic station density and requires long-term uninterrupted operation. And it needs to be developed in cooperation with related industries and departments. For example, TV stations, railway departments, factories, factories, etc., all need to be equipped with corresponding alarm terminals in order to exert the effectiveness of the early warning system. Therefore, the deployment cost of early-warning systems is not cheap, and there may be a long-term economic pressure on the local area.

If Josh Bloom, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, is successful, home earthquake early warning equipment will be as popular as fire alarms and carbon monoxide sensors.

Bloom spent less than $110 (about 677 yuan) on spare parts and assembled and installed an earthquake early warning device designed by him. Bloom’s main components used in assembling its Earthquake Quick Report Equipment (“EEW”) include Raspberry Pi microcontrollers, SD cards, speakers, and micro WiFi network cards, which are acquired from the California EEW system called ShakeAlert.

Unlike many countries such as Mexico and Japan, the United States does not deploy a nationwide EEW system. Like other EEWs, ShakeAlert aims to quickly detect the occurrence of an earthquake, estimate the magnitude, and issue an early warning before the seismic wave causes major damage. Currently, ShakeAlert can send out earthquake information via email and Twitter a few minutes after the destructive seismic waves arrive. ShakeAlert uses the California seismic network to detect about 400 high-quality surface motion sensors.

Bloom's prototype EEW device has been running for 11 months and is quite stable, except for forgetting to reconfigure the device after modifying the WiFi network settings once. In an earthquake in northern California on August 24th, Bloom’s equipment issued an alarm about five seconds before the arrival of a seismic wave. Bloom wrote in his blog post describing the equipment. "The recent magnitude 6.0 earthquake indicates that it is effective and that the mass popularity can save people's lives."

The five-second period may not sound like long, but it's enough for the train to slow down, control elevators and factory production lines, and put sensitive equipment in a safe state. A time of five seconds allowed the doctor to stop fine operations and give emergency personnel time to open the door of the fire exit so that people could escape in an emergency. Bloom said, "The five-second warning time allows people enough time to escape from the windows outside the room, away from a fixed shelf, hide in a safe place, white-collar workers in the office can calmly shut down the computer."

Bloom conceived that EEW equipment similar to its prototype could be installed on walls or ceilings of houses to receive information on earthquakes or other disasters from remote servers via wireless networks, such as radiation leaks, chemical spills, or even dirty bombs. . He said that the size of the warning device should be comparable to that of a standard fire alarm. Like other home wireless devices, it can be configured via a cloud or networked laptop and upgraded over a wireless network. The price of the warning equipment should be 50 US dollars (about *** 308 yuan) plus service fees, through home Depot and Target and other merchants.

Bloom noted that "the main obstacle is the lack of a powerful public EEW system. The deployment of public EEW systems will take several years."

The next step will Bloom create shells and develop software for its prototype devices, assemble more equipment, install them in their children's classrooms and friends' homes to expand their influence and raise funds. Since the earthquake in August, Bloom has also added tweetbot functionality to his system.