In a previous blog post I talked about measuring local traffic movements and the potential these have on structural damage.
Using what was an educational seismometer the experiment wasn’t totaly successful. I have since found another device that has the capability to measure the effects of ground movements on structures – it’s called the Raspberry PI Enviro Hat
It measures a few things like light and temperature as well, but I am specifically interested in the accelerometer chip LSM303D that it has which can measure movement in 3 axis and return values as g-force.
Converting g-force (g) into magnitude doesn’t appear to be easy but there is a website that correlates acceleration into the Mercalli Intensity scale. The Mercalli scale quantifies the effects of an earthquake on the Earth’s surface, humans, objects of nature, and man-made structures on a scale from I (not felt) to XII (total destruction).
The table from this website shows this correlation nicely. So I can convert the measurements from the rPI LSM303D chip into something approaching a magnitude measurement
