A good record of tonight’s G2 magnetic storm recorded by my home-made magnetometer:
Another magnetic storm
June 1st, 2013 by admin No comments »Audio of a Mag 5.7 Earthquake
May 23rd, 2013 by admin No comments »Today I managed to get a recording of a Mag 5.7 earthquake 206 miles (331 km) away. If you have headphones handy, put them on and listen to the sound of the earthquake. Headphones or good speakers are recommended because the frequencies are quite low.
The data comes as a side effect of the design of a home-made magnetometer I operate. When there is an earthquake nearby, the mirror starts swinging – this messes up the magnetometer record, but can be used to detect earthquakes quite far from here.
Chinese Proverb
November 9th, 2012 by admin No comments »- A picture is worth a thousand words; a video is worth 30 pictures per second.
Captured the Mag 7.7 earthquake off British Columbia, Canada!
October 28th, 2012 by admin No comments »
Oct 28, 2012, Mag. 7.7, Offshore of British Columbia, Canada
Today I checked the recordings for my DIY magnetometer (yup, that’s “magnetometer” and not “seismometer”; keep reading) and found that it managed to detect the Mag 7.7 earthquake offshore of British Columbia. That’s about 1200 miles away! Not bad for a device that’s not even intended to record earthquakes, 🙂
The magnetometer is of torsion design with free hanging mirror. This makes is susceptible not only to magnetic fields but also to very slight vibrations. While this might be considered a drawback in a magnetometer, I enjoy being able to detect far away earthquakes.
Because of the way the mirror is attached, the device is very sensitive to horizontal vibrations and has limited sensitivity to vertical vibrations. This is the reason why the P-wave, which is mostly vertical, is barely detectable.
Magnetic Storm
September 3rd, 2012 by admin No comments »
Magnetogram from Sept 3, 2012
Last night my magnetometer recorded a nice magnetic storm. It came as a bit of a surprise – it was much more intense than I was expecting from the size of the the coronal mass ejection (CME) that sparked it. The most interesting part of the storm also happened during the local night here, so I was able to get a nice and smooth record without much noise caused by things moving around.
[ Go to the magnetometer’s project page ] [ Real-time magnetogram data ]
GPS tracks around the office…
July 27th, 2012 by admin No comments »Today I put together one year worth of GPS tracks from my lunch walks and bike rides around the office. The colors correspond to different speeds – yellow is for walking, magenta is for biking and cyan – driving at highway speeds:
GPS Tracks
In case you feel offended by the bright neon colors, here is another version (blue = walking, green = biking, red = driving):
GPS Tracks
If you have tons of GPS tracks and want to visualize them, the tool I’m using is here: http://avtanski.net/projects/gps
Have fun.
Repairing a Garmin GPS that doesn’t want to boot
July 9th, 2012 by admin No comments »
Garmin eTrex Vista Cx
Today my old trusted Garmin eTrex Vista Cx GPS had a near death experience. I put some batteries that turned out to be really old. The GPS booted for a second, then the screen went fuzzy, the Garmin gave out a prolonged sad “Beeee-e-e-e-ep…” and died. So, I put in a pair of fresh batteries, turned it back on and… nothing happened. After a lot of testing with different batteries, shaking, knocking on the box, and even begging it to please wake up, I suspected my trusty electronic friend finally gave up the ghost.
With nothing to lose, I decided to open it up and see if I can do something. Maybe the microswitch has gone bad – that would be easy to replace. Testing the switch showed this was not the problem, nor there was anything wrong with the contacts that connect the batteries to the PCB. In a last attempt to fix it I tried shorting the pill battery that is soldered on the board for a few seconds. Kind of a hard reset. I did this, closed the box, put a pair of batteries in, and… it worked just fine.
So, in case something like this happened to you, and if you tried everything else, here is what you can do before rushing to the Garmin store…
» Read more: Repairing a Garmin GPS that doesn’t want to boot
Another minor earthquake detected
June 26th, 2012 by admin No comments »
Here is another minor earthquake that got caught by my “magnetometer/seismograph combo“. This was a Mag 3.3 quake about 16 kilometers (10 miles) from home. Note that the picture doesn’t show the earthquake waveforms themselves, but the swinging of the mirror. Still I’m thinking this is enough for I a real-time detection for events like this – maybe sound an alarm immediately when an earthquake is detected.
For the record, I know that a magnetometer is not supposed to detect earthquakes. However, the design of my DIY magnetometer makes is susceptible to vibrations. The result is that aside from magnetic storms, it catches earthquakes. I consider this as a bonus.
[ Go to project ]
DIY Magnetometer/Seismometer Combo
June 4th, 2012 by admin No comments »
Yesterday there was a small M3.5 earthquake about 15 miles from my home. I have a DIY torsion magnetometer that is constantly running and recording data. The swinging of the free-hanging mirror caused by the earthquake was recorded too (see the snapshot to the right). So, this is now officially a magnetometer/seismograph combo.
You can see near real-time magnetometer data here: http://avtanski.net/projects/magnetometer/data.html
[ Go to project ]
