Detect radiation.

Posted at 3:15 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by SchrodingersCat

Make soothing clicking sounds to help you get to sleep on the same pace as the ambient natural radiation.

Could also be used for some kind of random music event generator.

Posted at 3:22 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by gen

All inclusive “radiation” detector where is just a component of a larger handheld device for detecting various kinds of radiation….wifi, uhf, cell signals, etc

Posted at 3:40 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by strages

Translate English into Swahili

Posted at 3:43 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by georgewuzheer

for $150, I don’t think it’ll be doing anything for me :P

Posted at 3:46 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by nave.notnilc

There’s no isolation between the HV and computer subcircuits. How about an optical isolator (and sundry bits), since their isolation is well above what’s needed here?

Not exactly good design practice, imho =/

Posted at 4:12 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by nrrdzilla

@nrrdzilla

its sparkfun =/ some of their products arent exactly the most well thought out, but usually they are good enough.

Posted at 4:18 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by RazorConcepts

neat! it’s still not as pretty as LavaRand, nor as fast as high-gain CCD rand generators… but it’s got FREAKIN’ IONIZING RADIATION involved.

you will make pretty much any project cool with the addition of ionizing radiation, lasers, open flame, or spark gaps.

Posted at 4:46 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by emilio

(note: i’m referring to the old SGI lavarand, which was a web cam pointed at 6 or more lava lamps, not the current LavaRnd which uses high-gain CCDs.)

Posted at 4:49 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by emilio

Make a program which let’s the geiger counter send midi signals

Posted at 5:25 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by Kabelmaulwurf

Building your nuclear reactor.

Posted at 5:49 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by epicness

“What else can you come up with to do with this device?”

With two or more, measure cosmic radiation.

Posted at 7:15 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by andrew

What are you talking about? Clearly there is a white dashed line isolating the high voltage from the pc side of the board.

Posted at 7:19 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by McNoob

If you want random numbers, just use a resistor, an op-amp, and an ADC. Resistor noise is thermal noise and is just as random as radiation. You may have to do a bit of trickery to avoid any bias generated by the ADC, but at the rate the data will be coming in you can afford to combine several samples together to get each bit.

The best use for this radiation detector is probably as a data logger, perhaps used alongside a GPS to record hot spots. Too bad it doesn’t have a built in clock.

Posted at 7:20 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by Dan

Just add one of these, featured a while ago:

http://www.circuitsathome.com/mcu/usb/usb-isolator

Posted at 7:58 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by error404

Tape it to my arm and play fallout 3

Posted at 8:01 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by McSquid

Looks like a good (if not terribly expensive) replacement for the old-school ‘dosimeter’ badges typically worn by workers at nuke plants, etc..

Posted at 8:18 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by medix

@McSquid: Half-Life has one built-in :)

Posted at 8:19 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by saites

This is a nice design, even with the high voltages! I’ve built solid state particle detectors that work under 18 volts, but in my experience they are rather picky about noise and need Faraday cages… they are a fair bit faster though.

My first thoughts were: Wow, they didn’t use a wrong algorithm to produce numbers from sampled entropy. It would be pretty hard to maliciously inject nonrandomness into this system.

I may have used a Schmitt trigger to clean up the signal instead of (or in addition to) a filter, but I can’t argue with their results!

If they make a single photon detector next, I’ll take five please.

Posted at 9:47 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by Sean

Most gas discharge tubes will function as radiation detectors with a bit of hacking to keep light out. I’ve used the humble NE-2, expect that VR tubes would work, and have seen racks of standard long fluro’s detecting cosmic rays.

A way of generating low speed noise is to make up a cotton-wool & damp salt cell.

Posted at 10:06 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by Roly

What can I do with this?

Connect it to twelve arduinos and blink a LED.

Posted at 11:44 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by Drone

you couldn’t replace a dosimeter with this for a number of reasons, number one the film badges have to be permanently readable, and even if you added a datalogger to this you couldn’t power it forever, second with only one of those lnd712 tubes, you couldn’t read anything dangerous, even with the recommended 6 to 10 tubes in parallel you couldn’t read over a tenth of a rad…about the only geiger related thing this is good for is finding random radioactive painted dishes and antiques, which there are a surprisingly lot of.

Posted at 11:56 pm on Oct 21st, 2009 by cedeliing

could use it as a random key generator for file encryption.

Posted at 12:01 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by wolfy02

@nave.notnilc

Well if it really costs 150 it isn’t worth the effort. I can get a REAL one for that much. Yayy!!!! UnitedNuclear.com moved very close to me recently. Its my favorite site and its like a tiny candy store with bunches of variety. Everyone should check it out. If that doesn’t get you to this is their slogan:

Got Uranium?

Fanfuckingtastic.

Posted at 12:28 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by nope

Wouldn’t it be easier to get that book of random numbers and have the cat fetch one every so often?

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0029257905

Posted at 1:16 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by jim

datalogger in combination with GPS. Then put it in your car, bicycle, backpack, weather balloon, …

Posted at 2:26 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by hans

Make a hand held one that is sensitive enough, add a GPS locator with GSM automatic alert signaling, then give one to every boy scout group, sell or rent it to excursionists, etc. Voila: you get instant radioactive-mapping which will help a lot to bust illegal nuclear waste disposal.

Posted at 2:51 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by asdf

Use it to trigger the drop of a cyanide tablet into acid, and make a Heisenberg Cat box. :D

Posted at 3:26 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by Chaz

that’s a Shrödinger’s cat box, not Heisenberg.

Posted at 3:29 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by hans

Nice stuff. Anyone used?

Posted at 3:34 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by calvinn1

Pretend I’m a S.T.A.L.K.E.R and search for artefacts.

Posted at 9:45 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by Tachikoma

Use it as a stop-smoking aid for your loved one: it will set off an alarm whenever the radiation from a pack of cigarettes is detected.

Posted at 10:11 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by Joel

Radioactive cigarettes?? Now I have heard everything!

Posted at 10:30 am on Oct 22nd, 2009 by larrysanchez

I’ve always thought that if you had ten geiger counter elements you could create a truly random number generator. (Granted, I’m not the most skilled mathematician, so bear with me.)

Seems to me that all you would need is ten elements and some supporting circuitry.

On power up, the machine would initialize such that the first sensor to catch a particle would represent zero, the seconds would be one and so on.

As soon as all of the sensors had been initialized, the machine would start spitting out digits with each sensor spitting out its own value whenever it got hit.

Am I missing something? Would this still be pseudo-random?

Posted at 3:53 am on Oct 23rd, 2009 by Someguynamedjoe

It’s just too bad there isn’t a good alternative to the gas-filled tube.

Posted at 5:56 am on Oct 23rd, 2009 by Sharky

@sharky:

How about a 1N4148 ?

Posted at 9:13 am on Oct 23rd, 2009 by pookey