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Tunnel-God-Detector

Detect and locate the magnitude and origin of tremors to support emergency respons teams

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Hello everybody, we are Team Tunnel Gott Erkenner, German for Tunnel God Detector and we tackled the NASA SpaceApps “When Landslides Strike” challenge.
Our house in Stuttgart shakes regularly because of a tunnel construction site nearby with targeted detonations. This and other movements like landslides, earthquakes or avalanches should be detected and located. In this way Emergency teams can respond faster. Furthermore the negative impact on humans and environment caused by vibrations and noise is documented.
We used cheap accelerometers synchronised with GPS. Many of them combined can detect and locate the magnitude and origin of tremors. On the very left and very right of the command prompt you see in the demo in the video, you can see here two sensors and in the middle a time synchronising ping every second. Last night we already detected two targeted detonations on the construction site next to our location.

Intro: why we do it!

Hello everybody, we are Team Tunnel Gott Erkenner, German for Tunnel God Detector and we tackled the “When Landslides Strike” challenge during NASA Space Apps Challange 2017.

Our house in Stuttgart shakes regularly because of a tunnel construction site nearby with targeted detonations. This and other movements like landslides, earthquakes or avalanches should be detected and located. In this way Emergency teams can respond faster. Furthermore the negative impact on humans and environment caused by vibrations and noise is documented.

We used cheap accelerometers synchronised with GPS. Many of them combined can detect and locate the magnitude and origin of tremors. On the very left and very right of the command prompt you see in the demo in the video, you can see here two sensors and in the middle a time synchronising ping every second. Last night we already detected two targeted detonations on the construction site next to our location.

Listen to the sound of our tremors…

Satellites in space cannot look underneath the surface, but combined with our detectors, we can achieve that. Let’s do that!

Our Code on Github

Contact the team: tunnelgott(at)aerospaceresearch.net

Solving the problem: Why the strange (german) name?

The reasons we worked on this topic are deeply personal. Several members of the team experienced earth movements already.

Next to shackspace, the location of SpaceApps Stuttgart event, is the construction site for the Stuttgart21 (S21) project. A federal, regional and local improvement project of the train infrastructure. There are several detonations each day to drive the tunnel further underneath Stuttgart and we hve shaking windows and floors for about 2 years now. This is annoying, but not dangerous. And as a meme for not knowing when these tremors come and where they are digging now, shackspace members start comparing it to a mystical, ancient god living underneath us demanding sacrifices by making the earth shake. This deity was just called Tunnel Gott, which means Tunnel God in German, and mostly everytime the house is shaking, someone is saying that Tunnel God speaks to us. So this meme became our fitting project name.

But besides this amusing sounding story, one of our teammates experienced the Skopje Earthquake in 2016 with mb5.2 strength and more than 100 people have been injured and sought medical assistance. She explained that in 1963, a Mw6.1 earthquake hit Skopje destroying about 80% of the city and many dead people. So people still think of this shocking event when other earth quakes hit. Every minute saved in that you have data about the quake makes emergency teams faster and saving people.

Combined, these two facts lead us to tackle the challenge to help people by providing this data faster. We also included related effects like landslides and avalanches because we decovered these as most likely effected by the climate change and causing possible threats to everyone living in mountainous areas, no matter if in the developed or developing countries. So, our working group chose the "When Lands Strike" challenge and we came up with the following mission statement.

https://api-2017.spaceappschallenge.org/stream-images/FzafNbRGA-yU1ABmkq2fN9o2wq0=/2646/width-800/

Mission Statement

Saving people in danger by supporting emergency respond teams by tracking seismic activity and calculate origin of bursts faster. For that, cheap and open-source distributed sensors on ground in collaboration with satellites (space segment) and in combination with existing data in data-bases shall be used, that everyone can build or obtain easily and join creating the essential data.

Components: You can build your own sensor hardware < 50€

To bring the Tunnel-God-Detector to each corner of this world,...

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  • 1 × Raspberry Pi3
  • 1 × ADS1115 ADC
  • 1 × GY-61 accelerometer
  • 1 × MMA7455L or MPU6050 accelerometer
  • 1 × Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout GPS chip with 1pps output

  • A bothering mistake and open-source for reasons

    hornig05/13/2017 at 15:12 0 comments

    Do you know this feeling when you find an itzy bitzy mistake in your creation that is so easy you should have found it?

    After working for 24hrs on the prototype during the NASA Space Apps 2017 Challange, we missed a small type in this video (if you find it, you will forever see it :D)...

    The good thing is, it is just a video editing thing and we guess it would happen to all of us after not sleeping enough and wrapping up the hackathon project.

    If you don't believe us that this is the only mistake in this video, you can check our raw data. We put everything we recorded on our github repo for "Tunnel-Gott-Erkenner". The graph below shows everything we have from our sensor #3.

    We support the Open-Source idea that we will provide everything we have. Firstly, it is fun to not work alone. And secondly, we know that someone out there has a crazy good idea what to do with the measured data or even provide the one idea that makes the full system better!

    Have fun!

  • Here are the global nominees for NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017 and they need your voting support!

    hornig05/08/2017 at 21:26 0 comments

    We, Team Tunnel-God-Detector, are very honored to be selected as a global nominee for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017.

    We also like Team "Whata" and support them during their People's Choice voting run that started today. Please give them a chance, read about their awesome work and consider voting for them. We wish them all the best!

    The following text is taken with permission from shackspace.de...

    ###################################################

    We are very happy to anounce our two Space Apps Stuttgart 2017 winning projects Tunnel-God-Detector and Whata. And Whata needs your voting support for the People’s Choice Award of the world’s biggest global hackathon!

    (go to the voting page daily, search for „Whata“, Click on „vote“ and hold it until it says „voted“, that’s it, thank you! :) )

    During last weekend’s NASA hackathon, those two teams worked on solving global problems under this year’s theme „Earh Observation“. They tackled two different challenges and came up with excellent open-source solutions utilizing space data and create something new to help people. They both earned the global nominations and we wish them good luck in the final round where they compete against more than 1000 projects created by 20,000 people.

    Please consider voting for Whata starting from 8th until 21th of May because each daily vote counts! If you like, join their teams and work together on their open-source projects.

    The Whata team worked on „Where’s the Water?“ to use satellite and other data to allow farmers, landowners, and land managers in your locale to identify and visualize water resources in their surroundings. They’d like to help people find reliable water sources. They came up with providing the means with low-cost, easy-to-fabricate sensors, open-data, and existing govermental data.

    The Tunnel-God-Detector team had a personal twist on the „When Landslides Strike“ challange, that originally aimed about teams designing an easy-to-use tool to allow the public to discover and understand landslide data, and to contribute their own observations for use by emergency managers. They selected this challenge and and adapted it to a very shackspatial eperience. In shackspace, you reguarly feel tremors caused by targeted detonations to the S21 tunnel construction site. So they came up with this awesome idea to detect and locate the origin of tremors. And while discussing the idea, another (virtually present) team member’s experience about an earth quake she felt in Skopje, Macedonia in December 2016 made them work on creating those sensors. In this way, they want to support emergency teams respond faster and save more people.

    All 20 peope had fun during those 2 days and it showed, how much creativity is in everyone of us. We will definetively try to bring back the NASA Space Apps Challenge in 2018!

    Thank you to everyone and we will keep you updated about the nominees.

  • From a 2 day NASA SpaceApps Hackathon fun project to ongoing project to help people in danger!

    hornig05/07/2017 at 10:24 0 comments

    Hi, we are Team & this is our challenge solution.


    For , we detected + located tremors next to w/ 's + GPS + accelerometers.

    All you need for your own sensor is on our repo linked on the projects page.

    Have fun using it. And please consider to attend the next SpaceApps Challenge because it was fun working together with other people to solve global problems ogether. We had so much fun, that we will keep on working on the project and making it better!

View all 3 project logs

  • 1
    Step 1

    Our very first sketch to wire the sensor board on the backside. Sorry for the drawing but we did this under 2 days of hackathon stress and lack of sleep. But if we can do it, you can do it, too! :)
    When we are done testing it, we will update the sketch and give you a better layout in kicad.

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