Victor from Roteno Labs has built this Earthquake Sounder based on the 555 Timer called the Terremoto as a submission to the 555 Timer Contest that is running right now. The project is very interesting and yes the 555 Timer isn’t doing any of the heavy lifting in the project and isn’t the most efficient way to make sound but it is an interesting use of the device.
“The ECO is based on a 555 in astable mode with a resistor network to set the tones. NPN transistors are used as switches to switch in more or less resistance.
At first I was not sure how to query the USGS server to access the feed I needed. I immediately downloaded cURL to find out what I needed to send to the server. Turns out it was only a few short strings (very simple). “