Alegria’s rudimentary yet effective system comes from having survived Chile’s own earthquakes last year and seeing the devastation that covered Japan earlier this year. Keen on finding an inexpensive solution for early earthquake detection, he rigged an Arduino and domestic earthquake detector to tweet seconds before detectable seismic activity. Tweeting from @AlarmaSismos, it has already successfully detected every major earthquake that could be felt from Santiago since May. And it’s piling on the Twitter followers.
The only thing he has left to do is expand the project. He plans on deploying more sensors throughout the country, and is even working with carriers to start sending texts to people. Having the government help him a bit might not hurt either. [The Next Web]
Shane
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 11:15 AMGoverment: 14 billion dollars, nothing
14 year old kid in basement: awesome!
Ed Luck
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 11:52 AMThis is the problem with government projects. They’ll try to build something which is utterly foolproof and provide way more information than is critically needed. As such, it will take years to build and likely not do the one thing it needs to do, which is save lives.
Sam
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 1:34 PMUnfortunately modern mentality when something goes wrong is almost always “what went wrong?” not “what went right?”. Governments as a result take every precaution to ensure everything is fool proof, because they daren’t face the consequences if their system goes wrong.
In this particular case, I’m not sure from a practical perspective if “…seconds before detectable seismic activity…” is sufficient for anyone to respond and take countermeasures (and this is assuming their feed updates frequently enough to receive the warning in advance, my twitter only updates every 5 minutes…).
Having said that though, anything is better than nothing – and on initiative alone, this kid should be applauded. If this kid hasn’t been awarded a scholarship yet for uni/college, he ought to be!
WhiteDaemon666
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 3:14 PMThe largest problem in building something which is foolproof, is that people underestimate the ingenuity of fools.
cflow
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 1:26 PMIs anyone else amazed at this next generation of kids that are hacking the CIA and cobbling together quality Earthquake warning kits?
Mike
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 3:11 PMMeh, not impressed. All he’s done is hook up an out from the QuakeAlarm to the Arduino. Could’ve used any line that is set to high when it triggers (e.g. speaker line, light alert line, etc).
So all he’s really done is made the QuakeAlarm tweet instead of beep. There are enough examples online too that he wouldn’t even have had to write the code himself.
zen
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 5:11 PMMike – its not the fact that what he made is not technically advanced – its the fact that he made it when his government with all its resources, could not do something comparable.
Paul
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 7:31 PMZen, 100% agreed with ya.
Mike
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 2:49 PMThe gov’t *could* have done something similar, and easily better too. But they didn’t. That’s not so much impressive on the kid’s part as it is down right appalling on the government’s side.
Mike
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 2:51 PMIn other words, this is impressive only compared to the systems in place by the Chilean government. And really that’s a shocking thought.