Welcome to Namazu’s documentation!

Namazu (from the earthquake-causing giant catfish in Japanese mythology) is a framework for vibration experiments using shaking tables. Namazu is independent of operating systems, programming languages and frameworks, as long as the software can interface with serial ports. We provide here documentation for choice of hardware (motors, drivers etc.), the microcontroller firmware and the current implementation in MATLAB and Python.

The motivation behind this framework is to offer a versatile and low-cost framework for research and education for dynamic systems and earthquake engineering. Through our background in these fields we designed the firmware with earthquake signal generation from stochastic processes in mind.

The source code, 3D-files and further documentation can be found on github. The work is also published in a paper: Grashorn J., Bittner, M., Banse, M. et al. (2024). Namazu: Low-cost tunable shaking table for vibration experiments under generic signals, Experimental Techniques, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40799-024-00727-8

Note

This project is under active development.

Contents

• Usage
• Build instructions
• Mathematical Background
• Hardware
• Functionality
• Microcontroller
• Miscellaneous
• API Reference
• Bibliography

This work is a cooperation of the

• Institute for Risk and Reliability (Leibniz University Hannover)

• International Research Training Group 2657

• Laboratoire de Méchanique Paris Saclay (École-normale supérieure Paris-Saclay)

• Institute for distributed systems, department for Computer Science (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg).

• Institute of Mechanics and Computational Mechanics (Leibniz University Hannover)

Citation

The paper is cited as:

@article{NamazuEXTE2024,

author = {Grashorn J., Bittner, M., Banse, M., Chang, X., Beer, M., Fau, A.}, title = {Namazu: Low-cost tunable shaking table for vibration experiments under generic signals}, year = {2024}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, journal = {Experimental Techniques}, doi = {10.1007/s40799-024-00727-8},

}

The repository is cited as:

@misc{NamazuRepo2024,

author = {Grashorn J., Bittner, M., Banse, M.}, title = {Namazu}, year = {2024}, publisher = {GitHub}, journal = {GitHub repository}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.10533795},

}

Namazu as envisioned by DALL-E