10:23 am March 20, 2023 By Julian Horsey
Raspberry Pi enthusiasts or those of you looking to build your very own radiation detector might be interested in a new project published to the official MagPi magazine website over the weekend featuring a project from Dmytro Panin. The Raspberry Pi Geiger counter project features a retro M4011 Geiger Müller tube and is powered by a tiny Raspberry Pi Pico W mini PC. X Ray Scintillator
“The vast majority of the projects I build are created out of necessity,” he explained to MagPi “This one, unfortunately, is no exception. With almost daily threats of a nuclear catastrophe at one of our power plants due to Russian shelling or hints of a nuclear strike, some of us started to wonder how to detect an increasing level of radiation if something were to happen.”
“I configured an interrupt on one of the pins of my Raspberry Pi Pico W so it can listen and ‘remember’ the number of ‘ticks’ that the Geiger tube experiences over a period of time. Based on that, I can interpolate (or sometimes extrapolate) the current CPM (counts per minute).”
“Raspberry Pi Pico W can push the readings to a server every few hours so I can keep track of what’s happening with the ionising radiation levels even if I’m not home,” he explains. “But, unfortunately, due to the power blackouts we’re having, the readings are not updated very often as I don’t keep the device plugged in any more.”
For more details on the radiation detector project jump over to the official MagPi blog by following the link below.
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