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janrinok writes:

Wired is running a story about Andy Meira, a man who decided that there was a business opportunity producing earthquake detectors:

The morning of Good Friday 2014 found Andy Meira standing outside his apartment in Mexico City with his wife and baby, waiting for the shaking to begin. He was one of the few people in a city of 25 million who knew an earthquake was coming, thanks to an early warning alarm, called the Grillo (Spanish for “cricket”) he’d spent the last two years building. This was the first time the prototype had gone off. If everything went well, Meira knew he should have between 60 and 90 seconds before the quake hit the city.

As soon as the Grillo chirped, Meira hurried his family to the park across the street from their building. “It was so exciting, because it was the first time it had gone off,” Meira says. “Up until then it had all been maths and coding.” When the ground actually started swirling underneath his feet in what would be a 7.2 quake, Meira and his wife were actually smiling, standing amid scared neighbors who had rushed out of their buildings after the shaking had already started.

Even though the Good Friday quake didn’t do any damage in Mexico City, earthquakes are not something residents take lightly. An 8.0 temblor in 1985 killed as many as 30,000 people and destroyed hundreds of buildings, including a major hospital. But the ’85 earthquake also motivated Mexico City to take action. No one knows how to predict when or where an earthquake will strike, but it’s possible to get advance warning when one is on its way. Seismic waves ripple outward from a quake’s epicenter in two forms: the p-wave, which oscillates up and down, and the s-wave, which moves horizontally. P-waves are weaker and faster; sense p-waves and you can be pretty sure that more dangerous s-waves are coming.

[...]

A softball-sized black or white box with rounded corners, the Grillo fits the soothing aesthetic of alarms in our post-Nest age. The electronics inside come from China, and the plastic shell is from a small factory in the heart of Mexico City. For a few weeks now, Meira has spent his days helping to solder wires in place inside each Grillo, while other workers carefully fit the boxes together by hand—a process he and the factory owner, José Cappón Flores, hope to make more efficient just as soon as they raise enough money to invest in a better mold.

Meira initially hoped to sell the Grillo for 400 pesos, or about 26 dollars, though now that he’s deep into the the trials and tribulations of electronics manufacturing, he expects the finished product to cost twice that. As the next cheapest competitor costs around $1300, he may hold a more-than-competitive edge.