We've invited a small number of beta testers for the android platform, mostly to test that our website (which functions as our DAQ) is working and to get a base

We've invited a small number of beta testers for the android platform, mostly to test that our website (which functions as our DAQ) is working and to get a baseline dataset to characterize the kind of challenges we'll have in processing the data. AWS gave us a rather generous grant of credit for their services, and we spent a good amount of time developing a system for DAQ/live-metrics that should scale to at least a few hundred thousand users. The devices have to upload their data every ~3min, so it's a fairly significant amount of traffic. Beyond that we'd have to put either a lot more time into it or find "real" scalability experts, which means we'd need to get some $$$ first ;) The main thing that has caused our beta rollout to stall is the fact that we have not yet been able to successfully calibrate our response to muons, which are an important component of the UHECR shower. Whereas we were able to calibrate the response to x-ray/gamma-ray photons fairly accurately using common radioactive sources, there is no easy way to generate muons under controlled circumstances (you basically need a particle accelerator). We are applying for beam time at Fermilab, so hopefully we will be able to do these measurements soon. In parallel, we are also trying the "bottom up" approach, by developing detailed simulations to model how energetic particles interact with CMOS pixels. For this we're using GEANT, which does a great job of simulating how particle deposit energy into materials, but the hard part is modeling how that turns into actual charges that get read out by the CMOS electronics. We're getting close, but with nobody working full-time on this project and no funding, most development has happened in spurts and bursts whenever someone happens to have time away from their "day job". In order to look for cosmic rays we have to scan HD video frames at ~30fps, which is a ton of data. So that means we have to very aggressively throw away "uninteresting" data before selecting candidates to upload to our servers (in physics jargon this is called triggering). Since the muons are not currently understood, we are afraid that we cannot design an effective trigger. Which means that if we continued the beta roll out, we might blow through all of our AWS cash and then realize retrospectively that all the data we have taken is useless. Hence we made the decision to pump the brakes on the beta testing until we can resolve the instrumental questions. P.S.: If anyone really wants to give the app a try (unfortunately android only at the moment), feel free to shoot me an email directly. My email is my hn username at cern.ch.