Hi all,
I would like to share my custom Home Assistant integration, Earthquake Monitor.
The idea for this integration came from a recent wave of earthquakes in my region in Greece. I wanted a Home Assistant entity that reliably keeps track of the latest relevant earthquake, instead of having to follow updates in a browser or on a website.
Earthquake Monitor reports the latest earthquake that matches a user-defined reference location and minimum magnitude threshold. It uses the real-time webfeed of the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC), which covers earthquakes worldwide, and turns the latest relevant event into a Home Assistant sensor enriched with calculated attributes such as distance, bearing, relative location, country of epicenter, and nearest city.
Make sure you read the extensive README.md file to get the most out of the integration!
In the integration, you can configure:
- a reference point
- a local radius
- a minimum magnitude for local earthquakes
- a separate minimum magnitude for stronger global earthquakes outside that radius
- automatic clearing of the sensor after a configurable time
- a friendly display format for timestamps
The user can also define a zone “Earthquake Reference” (or “earthquake_reference”) in Home Assistant → Settings → Areas, Labels & Zones → Zones. If this zone exists, its center and radius will be used as default setting for the reference point and local radius. If it does not exist, the Home zone of the user is suggested as the default instead.
A few additional points about the integration may be especially useful:
- The integration includes localized configuration pages in currently 15 languages that were chosen to cover a large percentage of HA users, especially in earthquake-prone countries.
- it keeps the latest accepted earthquake stable, even when the feed later sends updates for older events
- it supports more than one independently configured entity
- it fully supports HA Maps, so the latest earthquake can be displayed on the map
- it restores the last accepted event after a Home Assistant restart
The integration can be installed through HACS following these steps:
- Add GitHub - fra-yer/Earthquake-Monitor: A custom integration for Home Assistant that reports local and global earthquake activity · GitHub to HACS → Custom repositories with type Integration
- Open the repository in HACS and click Download
- Restart Home Assistant
- Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration
- Search for Earthquake Monitor
- Complete the configuration dialog, following the guidelines below
Alternatively, the integration can be installed manually from the GitHub repository by copying the earthquake_monitor folder, including all contents, into /config/custom_components/, restarting Home Assistant, and then following the same setup steps.
Earthquake Monitor is currently at version v1.7.1, and is fully validated through hacs-validation and hassfest-validation.
Note that this integration is intended for informational use only. It should not be used to control safety-relevant systems or automated emergency responses.
Feedback, suggestions, and bug reports are very welcome.