We always love to see projects where you can build your own lab equipment so [CompactDIY’s] homemade seismograph caught our eye. The design uses an Arduino with an accelerometer and builds on one of their earlier projects. You can see a video of the device below.
The principle is simple. A hobby servo controls a pen and a stepper motor rolls paper, creating a makeshift strip recorder. Its software uses the Visuino system, which is a flowchart-like system, but it outputs Arduino code. Honestly, we would probably have just plotted the data on a PC, but there’s a certain charm to the strip recorder and the idea would work for other types of data recording projects, too. We thought if you rearranged the stepper motor and cut a paper disk out, you could also have a circular chart recorder easily, which wouldn’t need to friction transport the paper. A clock motor would make it even less dependent on software, too.
If this project interests you, try a Raspberry shake, which isn’t as delicious as it sounds. Or, keep an eye on the entire globe, if you prefer.
That “visuino” IDE looks terribly confusing for such a simple program.
It’s also a pay platform. The visuino guy has been hyping it for a while. Gotta admire the persistence…but I’d rather go with something a bit more open.
All these “visual programming languages” fall into the trap of apparent simplicity where even simple programs quickly turn into a mess of a flowchart that is hard to follow and difficult to debug, where a simple declarative program list that loops A, B, C, A… with the complexity tucked away inside functions would be much more readable.
Why paper and ink and all this mechanical thingies with digital sensor? Clickbait? Pure nerdity?
Why not plumb the output into an audio port so that you can watch/analyze the world rumble on Audacity? Nothing like a planetary-scale subwoofer, after all.