A Global Earthquake Display

As AndyGadget notes in his write-up, the crust of the Earth is in constant motion. While it moves very, very slowly, at times the pressure builds up until releasing in the form of a seismic event, also known as an earthquake. Although rare in some areas, worldwide we see somewhere around 150 of these events every day, tracked by a number or monitoring authorities, and aggregated via the Seismic Portal website.

It's an interesting site, but if you’d like more immediate access to what’s happening on the Earth’s crust, this project seems to be a great place to start. The device sits on one’s desktop in a 3D-printed frame, and shows a slightly modified Web Mercator map of the world on its 480x320 LCD screen. The most recent reported earthquake is displayed as a flashing red/yellow circle, with a diameter proportional to the magnitude. The next 100 seismic events are also shown, as yellow spots that fade to a dull brown. This gives the user a good indication of active areas in the world.

The unit runs off of an ESP32 dev board, which polls the Seismic Portal’s API every 30 seconds to produce a near real-time earthquake plot. It’s programmed in BASIC using the Annex RDS script interpreter that, according to AndyGadget, presents “a much more gentle learning curve than most other IDEs.” The end result looks great, and should help users get a better sense of the world's seismic activity.