The Minimus digitizer platform: a user-friendly ecosystem for efficient network management and seismic station configuration

The Guralp Minimus broadband digitizer has led the way with introducing a number of innovative features to broadband digitizers including easy network configuration, compact form-factor, extensive State of Health (SOH) monitoring and low latency digitization. Since its introduction, there have been major technological advances in processing chips resulting in the power consumption of seismic digitizers decreasing drastically in the last few years. The next iteration of Minimus, Minimus2, takes advantage of modern chip power consumption to reduce overall nominal power consumption by over 50% whilst maintaining high functionality. This significant decrease in power consumption will facilitate far more simplified field deployments for offline deployments.

The Minimus platform also provides a high level of functionality for online stations, including the industry unique option of sending State of Health (SOH) data via the SEEDlink protocol. This makes SOH monitoring far simpler for larger networks as SOH data be managed using similar methods as waveform data. This also allows for time-series analysis of SOH data to be able to proactively maintain stations and advance diagnose any issues before they result in any loss of data. The Minimus platform seamlessly interfaces the Discovery software to seamlessly integrate new stations into existing networks. The management of large numbers of real-time seismic stations is further enhanced with Guralp Data Centre (“GDC”) a cloud-based software package to build on the Discovery tool set.

The Minimus platform was built from the ground up to provide one of the lowest latency digitizers available with digitization latencies down to 40ms, making it well suited to Earthquake Early Warning applications. This is achieved with the use of causal decimation filters, high sample rates and Guralp’s proprietary GDI protocol. The Minimus platform is built as a modular digitizer platform that is available within a number of different packages to suit a range of applications, including as a standalone digitizer or built within Broadband seismometer and Force Balance Accelerometer systems.