Chilean teen creates earthquake detection system that sends out Twitter notifications

Earthquakes are nasty business, and after surviving Chile’s very own earthquakes last year and seeing the devastation caused by the recent earthquakes in Japan, Chilean teen Sebastian Alegria decided to do something about it, and what he managed to achieve is apparently something even Chile’s government won’t be able to do for another year.

Basically all it took was a $75 earthquake detector that could be easily bought off the shelves and with a bit of modding and hacking, which replaced the internal circuit with an Arduino board, it was then hooked up to his server. So instead of ringing like normal earthquake detectors do, it instead sends out a tweet using his @AlarmaSismos twitterbot.

As it stands, he has close to 30,000 Twitter followers who rely on him for receiving updates and warnings about impending earthquakes. So far it has been reported that it is working pretty well and that Sebastian has plans to start expanding his idea to more parts of the country, as well as a possible SMS alert system in the future. It’s amazing what kids these days manage to achieve and we would like to applaud Sebastian Alegria for his efforts!

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gadgets, General
Tags: arduino, Twitter