I would try to find some cheap outdated but commonly available Android smartphone which would have both GPS and an Accelerometer, and would have connectivity.  It might need to be plugged into the charger, but it would have accurate time (from either GPS or the cellphone net, or even NTP), and you could write a background service.  I don't know about sensitivity.

There are many ways to implement an inexpensive link - I had GPS+Accel+vehiclebus+more going over bluetooth using an Arduino Pro, but the DIY cost in parts was about $100 and was a bit of overkill (and I learned that accelerometers don't like motorcycle vibration).

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 9:09 AM, Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:
I have obtained one of the onavi-B sensors to play with

The quake sensor stanford is distributing is the
onavi-A and onavi-B, shown here:

http://qcn.stanford.edu/sensor-performance?lang=en

It uses a KXRB5 MEMS accelerometer from Kionix.

My intent, originally, was to see if I could find a way to combine
it with a ublox GPS over the internal i2c bus. It looks
like that will require using a different ublox-6 chip than in
the macx-1 with rewritable firmware and a firmware license, and...
well... maybe going some other route like leveraging
an arduino would be saner(?)

At the moment however, I'm trying to figure
out if there are any better MEMS sensors out there, or
better ways to hook them up than this device
which appears to have it's own protocol, running over
serial...

http://qcn.stanford.edu/join-qcn/request-a-sensor/sensor49-php

The qcn.stanford.edu idea is pretty neat. it's designed for boinc
after the fact analysis (and there is linux support)

The USGS has got a fairly decent looking prototype of an early warning system,
but their outside estimates for warning time is 20 seconds, presently, after
what they've designed is fully deployed. (and they are 100m short on funding)

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/04/earthquake_warning_los_angeles_usgs.php


--
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
http://ronsravings.blogspot.com/
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