Adventures with the seisMeowmeter

Last year I created the seisMeowmeter project which unfortunately didn’t see full completion and so it collected dust as a prototype while I continued on with other projects. However, while building the seisMeowmeter, the geophone showed me that the ground was, in a way, a lot like jello than something completely rigid. The geophone picked up footsteps from upstairs, it picked up cars driving by my house and it even picked up the tiny vibrations that were coming from the transformer in my oscilloscope. The fact that the ground could transfer movements over a considerable distance was something very, very profound to me.

Given how amazed I was over what a small can with a magnet inside could do, it persisted in residing in a spot in my mind as I worked through other projects. I couldn’t let this one go and I just had to do something more with it.

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A Review of OSH Park Boards

Over the years that I’ve made PCBs, I’ve used two main fab houses, APC and Advanced Circuits. For a while, I’ve been hearing some good things about OSH Park so I decided to give them a try for my latest project (which I will be talking about in a later post!). For those of you not in the know, OSH Park is a company that takes in gerber files from people who want their boards fabricated, panelizes those boards into one big board then ships it off to a fab house. Once the panels are made, each individual boards are cut out and sent to their respective customers.

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Christmas Cards Improved

After a long hiatus, meoWS is back! There are a few projects lined up for this year which will touch on navigation and IMUs, analog electronics, clocks and perhaps some RF circuits. I hope to also work on some more projects involving software, especially iOS development so stay tuned for neat projects and potentially useful blog posts!

Today, I will show off some Christmas cards that I made for some friends. I have been experimenting with paper circuits for quite some time. My very first card consisted of a few LEDs, a microcontroller and some tracing paper to diffuse the LEDs. It didn’t do very special things other than flash pretty lights. Over time, each card had changes from the previous iterations.
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meoWS on Hiatus

Since my last post, I have been extremely busy studying for my airplane driver’s license – consequently, putting a hold on all meoWS projects. I will be taking a couple of months off to study.

See you in September!

Seismic Sundays 7 – Streaming!

This is it.
Up until now the only people who were able to see data coming out of the seisMeowmeter was myself and anyone else I showed it to. Today, all that changes. Now you too, can see a stream of seismic data in the Calgary area!

Here are the links:
For the Raw Output, click here
For the Frequency Domain, click here

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Seismic Sundays 6 – We Have Data!

So between having to deal with an insane work schedule and fighting with an unruly microcontroller, I’ve managed to finally digitize the output of the seismometer:

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Seismic Sundays 5 – Fail

Take a look at these two waveforms pulled from a UART line with a logic analyzer. Notice anything interesting?

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Seismic Sund….Nope

It has been a crazy busy week for me and my brain is temporarily shut down so there will be no updates on the seismometer today. In the meantime, enjoy the some cat gifs and we’ll see you next week.

Seismic Sundays 4 – Circuit Analysis

Analysis gone horribly wrong

We’re almost done with this stage of the project! (I think…). Admittedly, this part has taken me longer than I initially anticipated, mainly because I wanted to spend a bit of time trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the circuit (circuit analysis isn’t exactly one of my strong points…yet)

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Seismic Sundays 3 – Debugging Woes

First, I have to admit that I messed up building the conditioning circuit. The first RC network after the first op-amp stage should have had a 6.8kΩ resistor. I accidentally used a 68kΩ resistor instead.

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