Would you like a large shake with that little Mac?

Specifically, SDSC researchers found a way to link the existing accelerometer and video sensor in all newer Macintosh laptops to its NEESit Real-time Data Viewer (RDV), which provides a graphical display of the movement. That, in turn, was linked to the Open Source Data Turbine, a streaming middleware system funded by the National Science Foundation used for sensor-based observing of a full range of environmental events, from structural analysis to weather data.

Once data from an event is captured in the Data Turbine server’s archive, it is automatically transferred using the laptop’s wireless network interface into the NEEScentral database repository, where students and researchers can collaborate on a global scale by analyzing, processing and sharing information. NEEScentral is a high-level data storage model that is universal to all earthquake engineering disciplines and contains information on how to archive and share data.

Software from the iSeismograph project can be downloaded for free by accessing it online at http://it.nees.org/software/iSeismograph for installation in any MacBook laptop. Data can be shared through the NEESit Data Repository (NEEScentral) after a user account is established by accessing https://central.nees.org/acct/index.php.

Researchers are scheduled to present full details of the iSeismograph project this October at the 38th annual ASEE/IEEE “Frontiers in Education” conference in Saratoga Springs, New York.

The iSeismograph initiative was funded by the NSF through the NEES Consortium, Inc., which manages NEES as a national, shared-use research facility encompassing 15 universities for the earthquake engineering community.

In addition to Van Den Einde, other SDSC researchers for the iSeismograph project include Wei Deng, production infrastructure support manager, and Paul Hubbard, with the Cyberinfrastructure Laboratory for Environmental Observing Systems (CLEOS) group. Additional members include Professor Ahmed Elgamal and graduate student Patrick Wilson, with UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering; Terry Weymouth, an associate research scientist with the University of Michigan; and Jason Hanley, formerly with the University at Buffalo.