I am beginning a new project, a seismometer. I plan on building a small "slinky" sensor. It consists of a powerful rod magnet (neodymium) hanging from a coil spring (the "slinky"). There is then a wire coil surrounding the magnet, so when it moves up and down it produces small voltage spikes. I do know a decent amount about electronics but am more of a mechanical engineering guy. Everytime I play with transistors and whatnot I always end up failing, the best I did was plug one end of a cool lookin diode i ripped out if a circuit to a grounded cable and connect the other to a stereo jack and listened to a AM sports radio station.
I figured the easiest thing I could do is directly connect the output of the seismic sensor to the microphone jack of my computer (maybe, MAYBE if I can figure it out, put in an amp to make it more sensitive, so I can pickup small and distant quakes). One possible way I can record and visualize the data is through something like audacity which shows the audio in a graph, but audio files that long of time would be massive. Is there another program which would graph this data from the microphone jack and in other types of files which wouldn't be so big? Ive been scouring the internet and havn't come up with much. Thanks bunches
I figured the easiest thing I could do is directly connect the output of the seismic sensor to the microphone jack of my computer (maybe, MAYBE if I can figure it out, put in an amp to make it more sensitive, so I can pickup small and distant quakes). One possible way I can record and visualize the data is through something like audacity which shows the audio in a graph, but audio files that long of time would be massive. Is there another program which would graph this data from the microphone jack and in other types of files which wouldn't be so big? Ive been scouring the internet and havn't come up with much. Thanks bunches
