The risk group had the pleasure to welcome two civil servants during some weeks. Naël Dillenbourg and Taavet Kangur are both presently students in microtechnics and robotics at EPFL. During their stay with us, they were asked develop and build low cost, low consumption sensors that we can use to monitor rockfall activity in the field.
Naël made a temperature logger with 5 thermoresistances that we can introduce inside the rock (after drilling) or apply to the rock surface. Data are collected by an Arduino and saved on a SD card.
Taavet developed on an Arduino board a system able to collect simultaneously data from geophones and from MEMS accelerometers. This system will be used to record rockfall activity and cracking events on site.
These kind of projects are particularly interesting for us, because they demonstrate that there is a huge potential to develop new and cheap sensors that fits our needs.
