Earthquake Detector using Arduino and MPU-6050
Tanya Yadav
Introduction
Earthquake detector is a system is a system of accelerometers,
seismometers, communication, computers and alarms that is devised
for notifying adjoining regions of an earthquake affected area. An
earthquake warning system works by detecting an earthquake's
initiation through P-wave (primary wave) energy radiating from the
center. These P-waves move faster (6 km per second) than an
earthquake's S-waves, which generate the most damaging ground
movements. The farther we are from the center, the more advanced
warning we will receive as the P-waves trigger alerts from various
stations. In my project, I have used a MPU-6050 Module which is
been interfaced with a microcontroller (Arduino UNO). After
detecting the moment across 3axes, the microcontroller glows a LED
and also the buzzer is triggered using the GPIO Pins. The Output can
be seen on the serial plotter in the Arduino IDE. The whole setup
works on a very minimal power and is very cheap and compact.
What is a Microcontroller?
A microcontroller is a compact integrated circuit designed to govern
a specific operation in an embedded system. A typical
microcontroller includes a processor, memory and input/output
peripherals on a single chip. It is a dedicated or single task device.
It is not an exaggeration to say that, today there is no electronic
gadget which is designed without a microcontroller. For earthquake
module a microcontroller would work efficiently and without any
technical issues because it has a minimal power consumption and is
compact. We would be using Arduino UNO.
The Arduino Uno is an open-source microcontroller board based on
the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller and developed by
Arduino.cc. The board is equipped with sets of digital and analog
input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion
boards (shields) and other circuits. The board has 14 Digital pins, 6
Analog pins, and programmable with the Arduino IDE (Integrated
Development Environment) via a type B USB cable. It can be
powered by the USB cable or by an external 9-volt battery, though it
accepts voltages between 7 and 20 volts. The Uno communicates
using the original STK500 protocol, it differs from all preceding
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School of Engineering and Technology, Ansal University
boards in that it does not use the FTDI USB-to-serial driver chip.
Instead, it uses the
Atmega16U2 (Atmega8U2 up to version R2) programmed as a USB-
to-serial converter.
The Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a cross-
platform application. It is used to write and upload programs to
Arduino compatible boards.
MPU 6050 Module
MPU6050 sensor module is a 6-axis Motion Tracking Device. It
consist of 3-axis Gyroscope with Micro Electro Mechanical System
(MEMS) technology. It is used to detect rotational velocity along the
X, Y, Z axes. When the gyros are rotated about any of the sense axes,
the Coriolis Effect causes a vibration that is detected by a MEM
inside MPU6050. The resulting signal is amplified, demodulated, and
filtered to produce a voltage that is proportional to the angular rate. It
measures the angular velocity along each axis in degree per second
unit.
It consists of a 3-axis Accelerometer with Micro Electro Mechanical
(MEMs) technology. Which have a very compact movable mass. The
acceleration is determined along the axes, as the movable mass
senses an acting force upon it. The displacement of the mass
unbalances the differential capacitor on the module which results in
sensor output. Output amplitude is proportional to acceleration. It
detects the angle of tilt or inclination along the X, Y and Z axes. It
also have an embedded Digital Motion Processor (DMP), which is
used to compute motion processing algorithms. It takes data from
gyroscope, accelerometer and processes the data. It provides motion
data like roll, pitch, yaw angles, landscape and portrait sense. It
minimizes the processes of host in computing motion data. The
resulting data can be read from DMP registers. Also, it has additional
feature of on-chip Temperature sensor. It has I2C bus interface to
communicate with the microcontrollers.
Estimated cost of the project
The estimated cost of the project will be –
Microcontroller(Arduino Uno) -Rs.342.00
Additional cost including installation -Rs.921.00
Total-1,263.00