If I were caught in an earthquake, I’d be pretty shell-shocked. But Sebastian Alegria, a 14-year-old Chilean high school student, decided to hack together a Twitter alert system that’s already a year ahead of the Chilean government’s own planned project.
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]