How To Use A Geophone With Raspberry Pi and an ADC - Seismic and Footstep Detection

Simply, think of a Geophone (also known as jugs, pickups, and tortugas) as a super-low frequency microphones for the ground. Used globally as acoustic Earthquake detectors, they react to any ground vibrations. These vibrations can come from seismic waves, passing footsteps or dropped pens.
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Geophones are remarkably simple and ingenious devices. Geophones typically contain a spring-mounted wire-coil mass that is free to move (up and down) within the field of a case-mounted permanent magnet (see this in the image below). The active element of the device is the wire-coil mass hanging on the spring. When the ground shakes (let's say due to an earthquake) the spring-mounted mass has inertia and wants to remain still. As the Earth continues to move, the magnet displaces freely up and down around the spring-mounted mass. This displacement creates a changing magnetic field which produces a measurable electrical voltage signal in the coiled wire. These voltage changes occur very quickly. As the voltage is the result of a natural phenomenon it results in a pure analogue signal.

Now as incredible as Raspberry Pi Single Board Computers are by default they have no way of reading pure Analogue signals. Thus we will need an ADC (Analogue to Digital Converter) to be the translator between these two systems. An ADC converts analogue signals into a digital representation so that they can be read and processed. Most sensors like temperature, sensor, sound or force produce analogue output voltages and the Geophone is no exception.

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Adafruit ADS1115 ADC (the new Revision is on a Black PCB! Pins are labelled similar)- https://core-electronics.com.au/catal...

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0:00 Intro
0:32 Geophone Overview
1:25 ADC Overview
2:02 What You Need
3:01 Assembly of Hardware
6:41 Software Set Up
8:52 Download Example Scripts
9:20 Live Output Plot Script
11:32 100 Samples/24 Hour Record Script
13:58 Taking a Photo Based on Footsteps
16:07 Where to Now
16:39 Outro