An Open Source Firmware For Cheap Geiger Counters

June 24, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

It is a time-honored tradition: buy some cheap piece of gear and rewrite the firmware to make it work better. [Gissio] managed to do just that for a cheap FS2011 Geiger counter. Apparently, the firmware will also work with some similar Chinese models, too.

The new firmware boasts an improved UI and multiple measurement units, including Sievert, Rem, and counts per minute or second. You can hold the measurement or compute a dose or average rate. The new firmware also has a host of customizations and can accommodate different tubes.

There are, however, two really key features. First, the new firmware offers about 40% more battery life than the stock version. Second, there is now an onboard nuclear chess game! That way, you can enjoy yourself while you are getting irradiated. There are also a few suggested hardware mods that are optional to improve measurements and increase the buzzer volume, among other things.

If you get a Geiger counter, you might be surprised at what things are slightly radioactive. If you don’t need the microcontroller, you can make a workable counter on the cheap.

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The Many Robots That Ventured Into The Chernobyl NPP #4 Reactor

June 22, 2023 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Before the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP, spelled ‘Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian) disaster in 1986, there had been little need for radiation-resistant robots to venture into high-risk zones.

Yet in the aftermath of the massive steam explosion at the #4 reactor that ripped the building apart — and spread radioactive material across the USSR and Europe — such robots were badly needed to explore and provide clean-up services. The robots which were developed and deployed in a rush are the subject of a recent video by [The Chornobyl Family].

While some robots were more successful than others, with the MF-2 remote mine handling robot suffering electronic breakdowns, gradually the robots became more refined. As over the years the tasks shifted from disaster management to clean-up and management of the now entombed #4 reactor, so too did the robots. TR-4 and TR-5 were two of the later robots that were developed to take samples of material within the stricken reactor, with many more generations to follow.

The video also reveals the fate of many of these robots. Some are buried in a radioactive disposal site, others are found on the Pripyat terrain, whether set up as a tourist piece, or buried in shrubbery. What’s beyond doubt is that it are these robots that provided invaluable help and saved countless lives, thanks to the engineers behind them.

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Teardown Of An Aircraft Video Symbol Generator

June 19, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 17 Comments

[Adrian Smith] recently scored an avionics module taken from a British Aerospace 146 airliner and ripped it open for our viewing pleasure. This particular aircraft was designed in the early 1980s when the electronics used to feed the various displays in the cockpit were very different from modern designs. This particular box is called a ‘symbol generator’ and is used to generate the various real-time video feeds that are sent to the cockpit display units. Various instruments, for example, the weather radar, feed into it, and it then reformats the video if needed, mixing in any required additional display.

Top view of the symbol generator instrument rack

There are many gold-plated chips on these boards, which indicates these may be radiation-hardened versions of familiar devices, most of which are 54xx series logic. 54xx series logic is essentially the same functionally as the corresponding 74xx series, except for the much wider operating temperature range mandated by military and, by extension, commercial aviation needs. The main CPU board appears to be based around the Intel 8086, with some Zilog Z180 compatible processors used on the two video display controller boards. We noted the Zilog Z0853604, which is their counter/timer/GPIO chip. Obviously, there are many custom ASICs produced by Honeywell as well as other special order items that you’ll never find the datasheet for. Now there’s a challenge!

Finally, we note the standard 400 Hz avionics-standard power supply, which, as some may know, is the standard operating frequency for the AC power system used within modern aircraft systems. The higher frequency (compared to 50 or 60 Hz) means the magnetic components can be physically smaller and, therefore, lighter for a given power handling capability.

We see a lot of avionics teardowns, likely because they’re fascinating. Here’s some more British military gear, an interesting RF distance measuring box from the 1970s, and finally, some brave soul building their own avionics gear. What could possibly go wrong?

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The Integral Molten Salt Reactor And The Benefits Of Having A Liquid Fission Reactor

June 7, 2023 by Maya Posch 48 Comments

Although to most the term ‘fission reactor’ brings to mind something close to the commonly operated light-water reactors (LWRs) which operate using plain water (H₂O) as coolant and with sluggish, thermal neutrons, there are a dizzying number of other designs possible. Some of these have been in use for decades, like Canada’s heavy water (D₂O) reactors (CANDU), while others are only now beginning to take their first step towards commercialization.

These include helium-cooled, high-temperature reactors like China’s HTR-PM, but also a relatively uncommon type developed by Terrestrial Energy, called the Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR). This Canadian company recently passed phase 2 of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s (CNSC) pre-licensing vendor review. What makes the IMSR so interesting is that as the name suggests, it uses molten salts: both for coolant and the low-enriched uranium fuel, while also breeding fuel from fertile isotopes that would leave an LWR as part of its spent fuel.

So why would you want your fuel to be fluid rather than a solid pellet like in most reactors today?

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South Korea Successfully Sends Satellites To Orbit

May 30, 2023 by Chris Lott 8 Comments

South Korea’s KARI ( Korea Aerospace Research Institute ) successfully put a commercial satellite into orbit Thursday, achieving another milestone in their domestic space program. The Nuri rocket (aka KLSV-2) left the Naro Space Center launch pad on the southern coast of the peninsula at 18:24 KST, after a communications glitch in the pad’s helium tank facility caused a one-day slip. The primary payload was the 180 kg refrigerator-sized Earth observation satellite NEXTSat-2. It uses synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and also has instruments to observe neutrons in near-Earth orbit due to the impact of solar activity on cosmic radiation. In addition, seven CubeSats were successfully deployed:

Justek JLC-101-V1.2, to verify satellite orbital control system
Lumir, measuring cosmic radiation and testing rad-hardened microprocessor design
Cairo Space, weather observation and space debris technology demonstration
KASI-SAT (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute) SNIPE, actually four nano-sats which will achieve a 500 km – 600 km polar orbit and fly in formation to measure plasma variations.

It seems that SNIPE-C, Justek, and Lumir are having communication troubles and may be lost. Ground controllers are still searching. This launch comes almost one year after the previous launch of a dummy satellite in June, which we wrote about last year.

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Open-Source AR Hack Chat

May 29, 2023 by Dan Maloney No comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 31 at noon Pacific for the Open-Source AR Hack Chat with Raj Nakaraja!

We may live in a soup of electromagnetic waves that range in wavelength from the diameter of Jupiter down to a fraction of the radius of a hydrogen atom, but our eyeballs have evolved to only let us sense a tiny slice of that spectrum. That’s too bad, really, because there’s a lot going on in the rest of the spectrum that could potentially inform our ROYGBIV-centric view of the world. Think of the possibilities of being able to see UV the way an insect does, or being able to watch the radiation pattern of an antenna and make adjustments on the fly. Sounds like a job for augmented reality.

If seeing the world with different eyes sounds as cool to you as it does to us, you won’t want to miss Raj Nakaraja’s stop by the Hack Chat. Raj is head of engineering at Brilliant Labs, an augmented reality company that’s looking to bring AR into the mainstream. They’ve got some cool ideas about AR, and we’re going to take the opportunity to talk to Raj about open-source AR in general, Brilliant’s products specifically, and how AR can be incorporated into not only our projects, but into our lives as well.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 31 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

The CCTV Cameras That Recorded The Chernobyl Disaster And Aftermath

May 29, 2023 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The Soviet KTP-63-based remote controlled camera system, including switch and control panel. (Credit: Chernobyl Family on YouTube) — The Soviet KTP-63-based remote-controlled camera system, including switch and control panel. (Credit: Chernobyl Family on YouTube)

When we picture the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster and its aftermath, we tend to recall just the commonly shared video recorded by television crews, but the unsung heroes were definitely the robotic cameras that served to keep an eye on not only the stricken reactor itself but also the sites holding contaminated equipment and debris. These camera systems are the subject of a recent video by the [Chernobyl Family] channel on YouTube, as they tear down, as well as plug in these pinnacles of 1980s vidicon-based Soviet engineering.

When the accident occurred at the #4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) in 1986, engineers not only scrambled to find ways to deal with the immediate aftermath but also to monitor and enter radioactive areas without exposing squishy human tissues. This is where the KTP-63 and KTP-64 cameras come into play. One is reminiscent of your typical security camera, while the other is a special model that uses a mirror instead of directly exposing the lens and tube to radiation. As a result, the latter type was quite hardy. Using a central control panel, multiple cameras could be controlled.

When mounted to remotely controlled robots, these cameras were connected to an umbilical cord that gave operators eyes on the site without risking any lives, making these cameras both literally life-savers and providing a solid template for remote-controlled vehicles in future disaster zones.

Editor’s note: Historically, the site was called Чернобыль, which is romanized to Chernobyl, but as a part of Ukraine, it is now Чорнобиль or Chornobyl. Because the disaster and the power plant occurred in 1986, we’ve used the original name Chernobyl here, as does the YouTube channel.

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