Make's roundup of DIY radiation detectors

John Baichtal says: "MAKE's interview with hardware hacker Akiba highlighted a fascinating trend: individuals and small groups taking their safety into their own hands by creating, modifying, and networking radiation detectors, a.k.a. Geiger counters, rather than relying on governments for information. The following projects and kits aim to put Geiger counters in the hands of ordinary makers."

DIY Geiger Counters Take Center Stage

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

Hey sockpuppet – this is a post about making your own geiger counter. I’m not sure where you got “hysterical ill informed reaction” from that. I happen to like electronics and science, and would be interested to build a geiger counter regardless of the situation in Japan. I also happen to own an oscilloscope. Would that be due to my being hysterically ill informed as to the nature of electromagnetic waveforms? I mean shit, I’m not a scientist so what business do I have owning a piece of equipment like that? Then there’s the shortwave radio, nothing good can come from having one of those. Go back to sleep! Baaaaa baaaaaa baaaaaaa….
Telecustard

If you want a simpler geiger counter to start with you might try this one. School kids from 7th to 12th grade built these back in the 80s, if you can’t build this one, electronics might not be your thing.

http://www.charlesedisonfund.org/experiments/experiments-list.html

Scroll to the bottom of the page and download the pdf of chapter 8 for the instructions. You might find other relevant info as regards handy sources to use for testing.
Dean W. Armstrong

I’ve got a great thing for you, offdutygnome. I made a clicker unit for my otherwise PC-tethered geiger counter and I used an Altoids tin for the case.
taj

making your own geiger counter = very cool.

“taking their safety into their own hands” = “hysterical ill informed reaction”

Perhaps the other posters (or my other sock puppet personalities??) took exception to that implication that living in fear that our government is lying to us because, yeah, that’s a nice way to live, is good and normal thing.

I’m so FRacKinG sICK of it.

Got to work this morning and a colleague says, “aru gakusha (an academic) said that there’s a chance reactor 1 or reactor 2 will explode within a week!!”

Oh really? Which gakusha? Cause I can find you five more who say the opposite. 7 who say it already happened. And another handful who’ll say whatever you like if you pay them enough or if it’ll get them on TV.

Another of my colleagues passed out at work a couple weeks ago and hit her head, badly. Stress is a bitch. Fear fucks us all up. Please stop feeding and/or applauding it.

But year. Making your own geiger counters is very cool.
Zorro 404

Very cool to see the innovation there. In a few years someone will commercialize the pocket sized geiger counters.

That would be a very good science project to run in a middle school science class.
Sork

Let’s hope all these DIY instruments get properly calibrated before they start logging “the truth”.
Anonymous

Okay, WHY is it so difficult to obtain GM tubes in the UK? Is there some kind of conspiracy?
Anonymous

They all look spiffier, but harder to come up with parts for than a KFM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kearny_Fallout_Meter
ADavies

Jeeez Sork, holding_rabbits! Don’t be such a bunch of wet towels. Building your own Geiger counter, and learning about radiation isn’t “hysteria”. It’s just cool.

And I don’t think anyone is suggesting we replace professional monitoring with DIY. Though, I have to say it’s pretty interesting watching the crowdsourced monitoring maps. I love the idea of people taking things into their own hands.
- Sork
  
  Crowdsourcing still needs calibration. Using standard deviation on the data is not a substitute if a blind is following a blind. It’s exactly the same if it were crowdsourced weather stations with temperature readings. So one is measuring 29C and another gets 30C, which one is right, if any? I don’t critizise crowdsourced data, I just know people will read anything into a .1 increase in the data and panic.
jphilby

Only *some* GC’s are designed to detect alphas. Prefer them if you need to know about plutonium and/or uranium.
jfrancis

These can be used to make truly random number generators, yes?
HubrisSonic

Akiba is doing tremendous work at TokyoHackerSpace, as are the guys at RDTN.org
offdutygnome

Really? Do we need another do it yourself gadget post for something that most will never use. I love some of the “Maker” posts and kind of dig the maker subculture, but it seems as though this blog has turned into a maker blog. I used to read this to get unusual and eclectic news and information. I love random things the first time I see them, but if I see another post on building an (insert useless gadget here) out of an Altoids tin… ugh! Anyway, I still love the blog. I just do more scrolling and less reading these days. Cheers.
Chesterfield

Can you believe that NYC wanted to ban citizen owned geiger counters?
Anonymous

for a collection.
3 minutes, household items. i don’t think you need to speak russian to understand what’s done in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pdwf78bJqs

but yes, he’s building a Geiger counter.
Tokumei

@3William56

With respect, I suggest you come here to Japan and try living in one of the towns that the government says is safe, outside the 30km evac radius, while at the same time encouraging people to wear masks and not touch the soil.

Being careful with regard to something you do not understand is, drum roll please…..

*******************************
basic, rational risk management
*******************************

Whereas trusting government officials, nuclear scientists, etc., is the equivalent of outsourcing your risk management to someone with interests and concerns that are far different then your own.

It is not hysteria, it is common sense. Just because you have more knowledge (do you?) to make more informed decisions does not give you the right to dis those who do not but are making the best choices they can with what they have, and quite correctly trusting themselves first.
Don

I have several things I keep around just because they’re cool. In this case, I wonder how I’d test it. Surely keeping some radioactive material in the shed just for calibration would defeat the purpose.

In practical terms, I don’t have any illusions about what I would actually do with a radiation count. I live in western Iowa, maybe 20 miles from a Nebraska nuclear power plant. In case of a major accident there, the disaster plan for the nearest hospital (which I wrote) basically has everybody in town getting in their cars and heading east on US highway 30. No, seriously, that’s the plan: get in your car and bug out, down a two-lane highway.
DarthVain

To the writer that used the word “sockpuppet” as a derogatory word: Bravo. I laughed. Gonna have to use that one someday.

Anyway, regardless of the whole Japan thing, should someone actually build this, how the heck (short of somehow irradiating oneself or something)does one test to see if this thing actually works or not?

Is it on? I think so. Is that a lot? While interesting to build, might be better to spend the money on a commercial one when you life is in your hands. I can somehow see this being more dangerous than safety as people deliberately try to expose themselves to rads just to see if their gadget is working properly!
gmoke

People have been monitoring radiation around nuclear power plants for over 20 years now, independent of utility or government networks, using commercially available small geiger counters and data loggers.

Here are two of these citizens’ monitoring groups:
Seabrook monitoring group: http://www.C-10.org/monitoring.html#airborne
TMI monitoring group: http://www.tmi-cmn.org/
3William56

May I suggest an article for boingboing: a proper investigation into the actual documented number of deaths and illnesses from Chenobyl (complete with criticism of the source, as appropriate).

George Monbiot’s article in the Grauniad is a good starting point. http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/

Compare that, which is thousands of times worse than Fukishima could ever have been, with the 15-25,000 actual dead from the earthquake, salt it with a little look at the comparative environmental impact of the enormous quantities of oil, petrol, plastics and other nasties washed into the ocean and spilt into the land environment by the tsunami damage, and it might put some much needed perspective on this whole sad issue.
3William56

Terribly ironic to see an article on hysterical ill informed reactions to nuclear radiation below an article on hysterical ill informed reactions to cellphone radiation.

The problem here is confirmation bias on the part of anyone sufficiently paranoid/motivated to build one. Building a homemade geiger counter then measuring levels after an event tells you nothing without background data to compare before and after the incident. How do they plan to calibrate the meters? Any signs of proper operating procedure (like, not wearing a fluorescent watch)? How many zero/low answers will be ignored by the belief that they are faults?

And at the end of the day, raw radiation counts are useless without a threshold of harm limit to compare with. And guess who publishes those? The self same biased governments, radiological professionals and nuclear agencies that the lack of faith in makes it necessary to make a homemade geiger counter in the first place!

Alexander Pope had it right 250 years before radiation made so many of the population into tinfoil hat wearers:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.”
Anonymous

<-- Tokyo Hacker Space member.

I think a few of you guys are missing the point. We're not building more geiger counters in Japan because we're irrationally panicking about radiation, we're building more geiger counters in Japan *to calm irrational fears about radiation using hard data*. It's about scientifically-inclined people finding a way to give hard reassurance to non-scientifically-inclined people that might not have the background to be able to fully trust someone saying that there is very little danger. (Or to help people who are going into slight danger - e.g. volunteer drivers going up into areas that actually received radiation to deliver relief supplies - know how much danger they are exposing themselves to.)

It's also to take advantage of a opportunity to gather information about a rare event that might be useful in the future. (And it's an extremely cool DIY project.)

This wouldn't be necessary if there were tons of commercial built geiger counters around, but there aren't that many of those - they sold out in Tokyo within days of the accident. Kind of a low demand item on a normal day.

(Also, to pre-empt any comment about priorities, yes, we are doing more humanitarian projects, too - donation drives, solar lights, cell phone chargers using car batteries, etc. - the geiger counters are just the flashiest.)
Anonymous

“May I suggest an article for boingboing: a proper investigation into the actual documented number of deaths and illnesses from Chenobyl (complete with criticism of the source, as appropriate).”

Good luck with that. The Soviet union made a point of scattering the population of Pripyat far and wide. The same with the liquidators. How about putting a face to those who were effected?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5355810
http://alexievich.info/knigi/VOICES_FROM_CHERNOBYL.pdf
holding_rabbits

i’m honestly surprised that boingboing is giving into the hysteria of “shit, we gotta know if we’re getting that radiation or not!” soon there will be diy anti-radiation pills. i’m scoffing on two accounts:

1) there is no need for one of these devices, though fox news would have you believe otherwise. this is a symbol of fear-mongering talking heads.

2) so what if it works? i’m sure it does, but who needs to be concerned with it? what if it’s spiking like crazy one day, what will you do? run out of the house and get out of town? it’s basically a gadget that says either “you’re fucked” or “you’re fine.” so if i am really screwed by radiation, do i really want a smartass gadget telling me?
- Pantograph
  
  So gathering data is giving in to hysteria now? Background radiation is everywhere. Some places have more than other places. It’s interesting.
  
  In 1986 I was in school (western Europe), and we had an ancient geiger counter running in physics class (with cathode ray counting tubes) with which we monitored the rise and fall of radiation in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. If anything, being able to see what was happening was an antidote to hysteria.
  
  I own a Russian hand held geiger counter from 1992, the thing is probably hopelessly out of calibration by now, but it is fun to check your surroundings for radiation.
  - holding_rabbits
    
    i guess the point i’m making is that even if it’s cool to build one of these things, boingboing didn’t post about how cool it was until the japan incident…which leads me to suspect that maybe 3 posts in a day about geiger counters has nothing to do with it being cool. it’s like if they would’ve posted a bunch of stuff after a terrorist attack about how to purify your own water or how to build a bunker. it’s just slightly coincidental, don’t you think?