Turn Your Camera Phone Into A Geiger Counter

January 15, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 96 Comments

Next time you’re waiting in the security line in an airport, why don’t you pull out your smartphone and count all the radiation being emitted by those body scanners and x-rays? There’s an app for that, courtesy of Mr. [Rolf-Dieter Klein].

The app works by blocking all the light coming into a phone’s camera sensor with a piece of tape or plastic. Because high energy radiation will cause artifacts on the CMOS camera sensor inside the phone, radiation will be captured as tiny specks of white light. The title picture for this post was taken from a camera phone at the Helmholtz Research Center in Munich being bathed in 10 Sieverts per hour of Gamma radiation from the decay of Cesium-137.

We have to note that blips of ‘bad data’ from a CMOS camera sensor aren’t unusual. These can come from electrical weirdness in the sensor itself or even the heat from the battery. [Rolf]’s app takes a reading of the noise floor and subtracts it from the counter. Radioactive decay resulting in Beta particles such as the Potassium-40 in bananas or the Uranium in granite counter tops don’t really register, although [Rolf] did have some success with Potassium chloride and a long measurement time. Still though, it’s a really cool way to turn a phone into a tricorder.

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USB Geiger Counter Hack

May 13, 2011 by Mike Nathan 17 Comments

usb_geiger

[Vic] bought a Kvarts DRSB-01 Geiger counter a few years ago, and recently dug it out of his electronics stash. The counter is a run of the mil no-frills unit. It lacks any kind of LCD display and it cannot be calibrated, so Sievert exposure ratings are out of the question. The unit essentially monitors background radiation and alerts the user to the presence of gamma and high-energy beta rays via audible clicks.

[Vic] wanted to make it a bit more useful, so he decided to interface it with his computer in order to take long-term radiation measurements. He dug up a schematic online and deadbugged a small circuit using an ATtiny44. The circuit allows him to enumerate the electrical pulses generated by ionizing particles striking the Geiger tube, passing them along to his PC over USB.

The counter seems to interface with the PC just fine, but [Vic] does say that he’s getting some odd readings. He thinks that he might have damaged the tube while messing around, but he’s all ears if you have any insight on the matter.

Radiation Sensor Shield For The Arduino

April 17, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 49 Comments

The [Libelium] team wanted to help people in Japan measure radiation in their surroundings following the nuclear accident in Fukushima. Because of the affordability and seeming ubiquity of the Arduino platform, they have been hard at work this last month trying to get their Geiger counter sensor board for an Arduino out the door. We think they’ve done a remarkable job.

A Geiger tube is a remarkably simple device, but getting the part can be a fairly expensive proposition. Thankfully, [Libelium] has already tested and verified a number of tubes from different manufacturers – very helpful if you don’t want to be tied down to one specific component.

This looks like this is just the sort of thing that the folks at [Seed Studio] wanted for an open hardware radiation detector, and [Libelium] has already shipped their first batch to the Tokyo Hackerspace. It’s good to know that help is going where it’s needed.

Video of the sensor board being tested after the break.

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Geiger Counter Built In An Ohmmeter Enclosure

April 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Here’s a Geiger Counter that makes itself at home inside of an old Ohmmeter (translated). [Anilandro] set out to built this radiation detector in order to learn how they work. Like other diy Geiger Counter builds we’ve seen, this project assembles a circuit to interface with a gas-filled tube which serves as the detector. [Anilandro] takes a few paragraphs to discuss how this works; the Geiger tube is basically a capacitor whose electrical characteristics change as an ionizing particle passes through it.

Once he had the theory worked out he scavenged some parts to use. A broken emergency light donated its transformer to provide the high voltage needed. The rest of the circuit was built on some protoboard, and a speaker was added to output the clicking noises that have become a familiar part of the detector hardware. The tube itself is housed in a wand that attaches to the base unit through a cable. Check out some test footage of the finished unit after the break.

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More Radiation Test Gear

March 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This is a multifunction too for measuring radiation (translated). The measurements center around gas discharge tubes that react when ionizing particles pass through them. After reading about the counting circuit for the pair of tubes used in this handheld it’s easy to understand why these are tricky to calibrate. The handheld features a real-time clock as well as a GPS module. This way, it can not only give a readout of the radiation currently measured, but can record how much radiation exposure has accumulated over time (making this a dosimeter). An accompanying dataset records the location of the exposure. An ATmega128 drives the device, which is composed of two separate boards, a series of five navigation buttons, and a salvaged cellphone LCD for the readout. The translated page can be a bit hard to read at times, but there’s plenty of information including an abundance of schematic breakdowns with accompanying explanations of each.

This is certainly feature-rich and we think it goes way beyond the type of device that Seeed is trying to develop.

[Thanks Andrew]

HOPE Badge Proximity Sensor

July 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

The HOPE conference was last weekend and [Nathan] spent some time with fellow members of Makers Local 256 developing this badge proximity sensor. They took one of the HOPE badges, which have a radio on board for the tracking network, and wrote code for its MSP430 to detect other badges nearby. It uses a Geiger counter they brought with them as an enclosure, re-purposing the analog gauge to reflect the level of active radio signals in the area. You’ll find their demo clip embedded after the break.

If you managed to get your hands on one of these badges, don’t be shy about sharing your hacks. We want to see them.

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Hackable Geiger Counter

October 21, 2009 by Devlin Thyne 41 Comments

SFE_Geiger_Counter

[Aaron] A.K.A. [A1ronzo] at SparkFun has put together a hackable USB Geiger Counter. In his tutorial, he gets the Geiger counter to work as a random number generator. Later, he analyzes and discusses how well it works as a random number generator. In the past, we have seen a number of radiation detectors hacks such as the Mr. Fission digital Geiger counter, a count accumulator, and a Polonium detecting pen, Besides our inital thoughts of speeding up the number generation, and using it as a special character device, what else can you come up with to do with this device?