[Roteno’s] submission for the 555 timer design contest is an Internet connected earthquake alert system. It monitors the USGS website for earthquake data and plays a tune when an earthquake occurs. The data is available as a feed in the form of a TXT file which is pretty easy to parse using cURL. He chose an LPCXpresso board (which is an ARM development platform that can run a Linux kernel) along with an XPORT module to handle the Ethernet traffic.
So where does the 555 timer see some action? It is responsible for playing the tone when an earthquake is detected. But playing just one pitch isn’t much fun. Instead, [Roteno] built the circuit above which creates a resistor network switched by a series of transistors. This way he can use GPIO from the microcontroller to choose different pitches. Check out the video after the break to hear the results. At power-up all eight pitches are played as a test, and the alert sound varies in pitch and tempo based on the magnitude of the earthquake.
