31–40 of 69 posts
What a fantastic job. Free hardware and freedom to build super interesting projects as long as you can fit Balena in somehow. It's also a much better alternative to facebook ads or similar for a company's marketing spend...
I was wondering how you would detect radiation with brass and wood, but it turns out this was actually talking about how to build a snazzy enclosure and not at all about how to detect radiation : /
Even has some links to the model(s) used.
I was wondering how you would detect radiation with brass and wood, but it turns out this was actually talking about how to build a snazzy enclosure and not at all about how to detect radiation : /
OP links to their repo which has full instructions on how to integrate a geiger counter board with the RPi: https://github.com/balenalabs-incubator/background-radiation... Even has some links to the model(s) used.
I was wondering how you would detect radiation with brass and wood, but it turns out this was actually talking about how to build a snazzy enclosure and not at all about how to detect radiation : /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolometer
Wood is a thermal insulator, so with care, one might be able to build a thermistor bridge capable of detecting the differential temperature rise between pieces of brass when a source was placed near one brass-piece.
I, too, found that the expectations framed by the title were not met by the article. It's a pretty box, though.
I'm not sure where I read it but it was stated that the Geiger counters which are manufactured after the Chernobyl (?) incident were not as accurate as those manufactured before it. The reason is that all the metal after the incident and the radiation experiments performed afterwards is contaminated with radiation particles which alter the radiation readings of the Geiger counter. Correct me if I'm wrong about this one.
Remember well that Balena are the people who built spyware into a SD card flashing tool: essentially a GUI for running dd.
Lovely piece of work. Scary how active those old gas lamp mantles are (in the video). Makes me wonder how radioactive your average campsite is, given that those things tend to crumble to dust when you change them.
Looking at the video, the counter appears to peak around 200cpm, or (per the Grafana dashboard screenshot) about 2 microsieverts per hour. That'd take 50 hours, a little over two days, of exposure to add up to the dose of a typical chest X-ray. And that's for a whole mantle, placed directly adjacent to the tube; it's not obvious in the video, but the dose rate is highly dependent on distance. Spicy gamma emitters aside, most small samples drop to background just an inch or two from the detector.
So I wouldn't worry all that much about it, really. Eating a mantle, or breathing the dust from a freshly replaced one, wouldn't be a great idea; I'd expect it to increase cancer risk to a degree probably commensurable with some number of years of smoking. (Probably fewer years than I racked up, back when I still had the habit.) Nor would keeping a mantle in your jockeys, or your bra. So don't do any of those things.
But buried, or even just mixed with dirt? I'd worry more about falling into the fire, and that's not something I worry about a lot, even if it does typically get pretty drunk out every time I ever go camping with anyone.
Very cool project. Always impressed the level craftsmanship some people have.
Great work! I liked how well the vintage look and the modern core fit. I'm not sure where I read it but it was stated that the Geiger counters which are manufactured after the Chernobyl (?) incident were not as accurate as those manufactured before it. The reason is that all the metal after the incident and the radiation experiments performed afterwards is contaminated with radiation particles which alter the radiati…
I think most of the radionuclide contamination comes from Cold War atmospheric nuclear testing.
Some low background steel is recovered from sunken battleships!
Great work! I liked how well the vintage look and the modern core fit. I'm not sure where I read it but it was stated that the Geiger counters which are manufactured after the Chernobyl (?) incident were not as accurate as those manufactured before it. The reason is that all the metal after the incident and the radiation experiments performed afterwards is contaminated with radiation particles which alter the radiati…