Grillo Partners with IBM, the Linux Foundation for Open-Hardware Earthquake Early Warning Sensors

Distributed sensor expert Grillo has teamed up with IBM and the Linux Foundation to open source an earthquake early warning system, dubbed OpenEEW, with a view to deploying it more widely and potentially saving lives.

Large earthquakes can be devastating, and the earlier citizens are warned of their approach the better their chance of survival. Existing earthquake early warning (EEW) systems are typically centralised, relying on expensive equipment; OpenEEW, by contrast, can run on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a bare-minimum outlay on additional hardware.

"For years we have seen that EEWs have only been possible with very significant governmental financing, due to the cost of dedicated infrastructure and development of algorithms," Grillo founder Andres Meira explains of the project's origin. "We expect that OpenEEW will reduce these barriers and work towards a future where everyone who lives in seismically-active areas can feel safe."

"The OpenEEW Project represents the very best in technology and in open source," adds Mike Dolan, Senior Vice President and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. "We're pleased to be able to host and support such an important project and community at the Linux Foundation. The open source community can enable rapid development and deployment of these critical systems across the world."

To prove the concept, IBM has teamed up to deploy Grillo's low-cost open-source sensor systems in six locations around Puerto Rico — adding its own dashboard, based on Node-RED, for visualisation. "IBM is thrilled to continue collaborating with Grillo and to contribute to the new open source OpenEEW project with the Linux Foundation," says Daniel Krook, Chief Technology Officer of IBM's Call for Code. "Grillo technology has the potential to help save lives, which is just the type of innovation we look for in Call for Code projects. This is an exciting opportunity for the developer community to help us improve the software, hardware, and global network as an open source project."

The OpenEEW sensors themselves are based on high-performance yet low-cost MEMS accelerometers, claimed to be the equal of professional seismometers costing up to sixty times as much. Each features both Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity which communicate readings back to a central server, lightweight enough to run on a Raspberry Pi or other low-cost single-board computer. All the sources are available on the OpenEEW GitHub repository, under the Apache License 2.0.

More information on the project, including how to deploy your own sensors, can be found on the OpenEEW website.