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Qube Network: A Low-cost Consumer Seismic Network for Earthquake Monitoring and Earthquake Early Warning

The Qube is a low-cost Internet-of-Things (IoT) device for earthquake early warning (EEW). Each Qube costs less than $100, is about the size of a Rubik’s cube, and has WiFi access. It detects vertical ground motion with a geophone at 100 sps and provides on-site warning through sounding the built-in alarm and regional warning through text messages. From September 2020 to December 2021, the Qube has detected all earthquakes over the magnitude M3.0 around Los Angeles, small nearby earthquakes down to M1.1 and large distant ones such as the M7.5 earthquake in Peru. An empirical formula is developed to estimate the magnitudes of local earthquakes using data for each stand-alone Qube.

A Qube Network has been under development to test the concept of a low-cost consumer-based earthquake monitoring and early warning network. As of January 1, 2022, six Qubes have been built and shipped to selected consumers’ homes distributed throughout the Los Angeles metro area. The devices are installed by the consumers in a simple plug-n-play way and can resume all functions when connected or reconnected to power. Through a secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT cloud platform, the six Qubes are remotely monitored and accessible for data transfer and software updates. Data is also automatically uploaded to Google Drive daily. The Qubes are time synced with a Caltech NTP server. Live communication among the devices, based on the MQTT protocol, is used to communicate detected events, in order to provide regional warning and to reduce false alarms from a single device. The Qube Network has detected multiple earthquakes and issued EEW alerts. The data from multiple Qubes is used to estimate the epicenter location and origin time after the earthquake, and additional work is being done to enable live calculations. The Qube Network has great potential in low-cost EEW and educational applications.

Session: Advances in Earthquake Early Warning: Research, Development, Current State of Practice and Social Science [Poster]

Type: Poster

Room: Evergreen Ballroom

Date: 4/21/2022

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM Pacific

Presenting Author: Vivien He

Student Presenter: Yes

Additional Authors