Note: Seismo-at-School in Nepal declares to have no financial interest in the instruments and softwares described here.
Low-cost seismometers
- Slinky: The Slinky is great for demonstrating the main principle of a seismometer, and is sensitive enough to detect P-waves from distant large events and local sources. It is very convenient for educational purposes.
- Lego: The Lego seismometer is capable of recording large earthquakes from around the world. You can make your own simple seismometer using Lego, plus a metal spring, magnet, coil, and digitizer unit. Full instructions are provided by the British Geological Survey.
- Raspberry Shake 1D: It is a sensitive and user-friendly digital seismometer you can use in your home, office and classroom. Its sensors is a vertical geophone – a very sensitive yet rugged Earth motion microphone widely used in the oil and gas industry, to detect seismic vibration. Full technical details and specifications are on the Raspberry Shake webspage.
- QCN: The Quake Catcher Network seismometer is designed partly as an educational tool for the description of earthquakes and the discussion of earthquake science in the classroom. It is a digital accelerometer, better suited to record strong motions near large earthquakes. Currently, data download is not available. Further information are on the QCN webpage.
Softwares
- jAmaSeis: Analysis and datalogging software. It is compatible with all of the sensors above where the data can be downloaded. For the Raspberry Shake sensors, it works when the sensor is connected to the same IP-address as the computer.
- Swarm: An application based on Java which displays and analyzes seismic waveforms in real-time, from anywhere around the Earth. This is the most convenient tool to watch waveforms from several stations together.
- Several other softwares exist that are able to download, visualize and process seismological data.
Note: Seismo-at-School in Nepal declares to have no financial interest in the instruments and softwares described here.