While we normally see piezo elements being used to output audio, [Veedo] thought that they could be used in a more useful manner. He bought way too many piezo film tabs and decided to use them to build a makeshift seismic sensor.

The piezo tabs came with weights attached at one end, though while testing them, he found that they more or less only detected vibrations with frequencies in the KHz range. Since earthquakes tend to produce vibrations in the 30-80 Hz range, he had to tweak his setup to detect the proper frequencies. To do this, he attached a weight made of a screw and washers, checking the output signals on his oscilloscope until the dominant sensed frequencies were in the range of 40 Hz.

The sensor was attached to a breadboard, then wired through a charge amp to create a small AC signal, which floats on 2.5Vdc. The bottom half of the wave is chopped off with a diode, after which it is fed into an Arduino Mega. The seismic data is then pushed up to his Pachube account for storage, though he can view the feeds locally via the a web server programmed into the Arduino.

We’re not sure how much advanced notice this sort of setup would give you in the event of an earthquake, but it seems like a fun project to build either way.

Reader [john] finished up his home power monitor over the holiday weekend. It uses a pair of current transducers clamped onto the mains. These output 0-3V and are read by the Arduino’s ADC. The Arduino averages samples over a 20 second period, calculates power used, and uploads it using an Ethernet Shield. The shield can’t do DNS lookups, so he uses a WRT54G to negotiate with the remote webserver. He admits that the system could be more accurate; it can’t detect small loads like wall warts. He also says that money could be saved by talking serial to the router instead of over ethernet. Here are the current usage charts.

You can find many power monitor projects like this in out Home Hacks category.

Arduino has just released an official ethernet shield. It’s based on the same WizNet W5100 chip that was used in the tiny ethernet board we covered earlier. The W5100 handles the full IP stack and can do TCP or UDP with four simultaneous sockets. The board has a power indicator plus six LEDs to debug the connection. It works with the standard ethernet library. The reset button resets the shield and the Arduino. The SD adapter is not currently supported by the Arduino software.