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Show HN: I built a desktop radiation monitor with Raspberry Pi, brass and wood
- dvt 6y agoObviously a marketing piece, but a ton of work went into it, so I'm sure HN will be kind ;) In any case, this is a very awesome build!
- anakaine 6y agoMarketing? It's a one off build.
- crispyporkbites 6y agoIt’s marketing for the cloud iot platform on the blog
- uptown 6y agoAlso wood. He used wood and clearly is in deep with the hardwood movement.
- PanosJee 6y agoWould you prefer a Gartner report?
- jlengrand 6y agoThe sheer amount of work ! Well done and beautiful!
- chrisys 6y agoThanks - it was so much work, but super rewarding as the thing looks beautiful on my desk. It's awesome to see it's appreciated :)
- wolfhumble 6y agoThe wood, the brass, the tubes, the clicks, the faint light from the indicators, the tech . . . Absolutely beautiful, thanks for sharing!
- bb123 6y agoThis is really fun. I love the idea that something so old looking is running some state of the art stuff behind it.
- imrehg 6y agoVery well done, Chris, this look gorgeous, and super well detailed!
- chrisys 6y agoThanks Greg, nice to see you here :)
- snak 6y agoLooks amazing. Dekatron tubes are great, I didn't know what they were called, thanks for sharing.
- PeterBarrett 6y agoThis is really beautiful craftsmanship! It will definitely influence my own projects in the future, thanks for sharing.
- chrisys 6y agoThanks for the compliment Peter, if I can inspire others like yourself to get building, I'm happy :)
- Luc 6y agoI wish there was a cheap way to calibrate low-cost or surplus radiation monitors.
- hanoz 6y agoLovely 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.
- chrisys 6y agoThey are quite radioactive for a household item indeed. The dust is a good point I keep that one double bagged for that reason, although they aren't as fragile when they're new.
- throwanem 6y agoNot very. The predominant isotope of thorium is an alpha emitter with a half-life measured in tens of billions of years. 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.
- walrus01 6y agoFor comparison I have seen statistics that a granite countertop, or granite flooring can emit around 1.7 microsieverts per hour. Granite is mildly radioactive. I imagine working in an old 1920s era office building with granite column facing materials and granite hallway flooring would be a lot more radiation load on the body, unless you spent dedicated time every day seeking out and handling gas lamp mantles. Lots of people have marble and granite countertops in their kitchen...
- ElLapidas 6y agoYet another blatant marketing piece in the frontpage. I wonder if the pro-adblock HN crowd is becoming more open to these things.
- dkarp 6y agoIf a company chooses to spend their marketing budget in creating quality content then I don’t see a problem with it. There’s an obvious bias towards their software, but it’s on their website so that is clear, and the project is interesting and worthy of discussion. why wouldn’t it be on HN?
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- unixhero 6y agoBalena is pretty great. I use its balenaetcher often. It's a great isofile to usb tool! Which also happens to be another free or from the balena company.
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- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI like seeing some of these “ephemera” projects highlighted (like the kosher search engine and the manila folder 777). We can do some cool stuff. Thanks for sharing this!
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- costcopizza 6y agoWow, beautiful work! Where can I find more, similar projects to this one? It doesn’t even need to have electronics in it, I just have the itch to try and build something, but literally do not know where to start.
- draugadrotten 6y agofor inspiration .... http://www.lovehulten.com/ http://www.lovehulten.com/
- drewzero1 6y agoThis is great! I especially love the PET De Lux. Saving this one for later.
- stepstop 6y agoIncredible! Thank you for writing this up & sharing this! I’ll need to come back and read every word later but wanted to share my thanks. We need more like this on HN and less of the politics
- SiempreViernes 6y agoI 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 : /
- Jestar342 6y agoOP 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-monitor https://github.com/balenalabs-incubator/background-radiation... Even has some links to the model(s) used.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoI hope you see the difference between building a Geiger tube and buying one.
- ashtonkem 6y agoBuilding a Geiger tube is probably beyond the reach of most people. That’s a precision piece of equipment.
- ISL 6y agoI'd argue that it is beyond the perceived reach of many people, but it is not beyond the actual reach of many people. The key ingredients are aspiration and time.
- heisbsissi 6y agoAnother commenter on hacker news completely out of touch with the lives the vast majority of humanity lives. It's amazing how the simplistic intellectual masturbation here is similar to reddit except with reddit it's because they are teenagers and here it's because the users are just basic enough to make decent enough and not much more than that.
- BolexNOLA 6y agoWow man. Nothing to add, this is just gorgeous
- dkarp 6y agoI remember seeing this role (maybe it was https://workaline.com/listing/38e26af8 https://workaline.com/listing/38e26af8) listed at Balena last year. 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...
- overfl0w 6y agoGreat 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 radiation readings of the Geiger counter. Correct me if I'm wrong about this one.
- matthewmcg 6y agoI don’t know about Chernobyl specifically, but so-called low background steel from before 1945 is harvested specifically for use in radiation sensing applications. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel I think most of the radionuclide contamination comes from Cold War atmospheric nuclear testing. Some low background steel is recovered from sunken battleships!
- arethuza 6y agoOn a related note - the day the German fleet (which went on to be scuttled at Scapa Flow and to become a source of that low-background steel) must have been quite an incredible sight - possibly one of the largest collection of warships ever (40 battleships, there were only 7 at the Normandy Landings): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30128199 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30128199
- overfl0w 6y agoYes, this is it, thank you for providing the source, it was an interesting read.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoThat has to do with atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, not Chernobyl. You can still see some weapons testing isotopes in a 24-hour background count on a high-purity Germanium radiation detector.
- mywittyname 6y ago
- sneak 6y agoGreat device, and great content marketing. Remember well that Balena are the people who built spyware into a SD card flashing tool: essentially a GUI for running dd. https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/2497 https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/2497
- dandigangi 6y ago3.6 roentgen. Not great. Not terrible. Very cool project. Always impressed the level craftsmanship some people have.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoIf anyone wants some context about radiation dose units across various orders of magnitude, I recommend the charts in this DOE chart (see page 6) [1] [1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ionizing-radiation-dose-ranges-jan-2018.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ioni...
- dandigangi 6y agoWas expecting someone to downvote me because they haven't seen Chernobyl on HBO. Haha
- chrisys 6y agoThe opening line of my blog post was almost a reference to this, then nobody I had proof read the post got it so I took it out :P
- basementcat 6y agoAnother radiation dose chart from XKCD. https://xkcd.com/radiation/ https://xkcd.com/radiation/
- f1refly 6y agoRemove this man from the comment section, he's in shock!
- staycoolboy 6y agoLooks fantastic! Well done! Why didn't you go full brass on the decatrons, instead of mixing stainless and copper? Same goes for the counter box: you only wrapped 2 sides when you pro'lly could have wrapped the whole thing in brass... you probably saved yourself 10 hours by not doing that, but you're already in for what, 30 hours already? Now I'm going to nitpick. :) My only critique is the high gloss finish on the wood looks unfinished in the final assembly picture: you can see drips/wrinkles, and the grain wasn't filled which isn't a good match with high gloss, or if unfilled a hand-oiled finish would not have called attention. This is a consequence of working with mahogany. (And what's with the hand filed-gouges in the cutouts. Yes they are hidden, but details count, man!) I'm also jealous you have a machine shop. Very jealous. Super job!
- chrisys 6y agoThanks for the compliments, and I appreciate your eye for detail and nitpicking :) I don't even wanna think about how many hours I put into this thing. It was one of those projects when you've got some free time you just keep working on it, then eventually, one day, it turns out there's nothing else to do. For the Dekatrons, it was simply a case of I had 50mm stainless steel bar already in the shop, but the biggest brass I had was probably 30mm diameter. I bought a whole load of bar stock offcuts from an auction years ago and pretty much everything I make is made from that lot. That being said I broke so many tools trying to work with M2 threads in stainless that I could have just bought some brass bar! As for the dips/wrinkles in the case, those were caused by my use of an oscillating drum sander. There's a photo in the blog post where you'll see I used the drum sander to bring the lid to size. I foolishly let it mark the previously pristine planed surfaces, and didn't realise until I had coated it with gloss. This is definitely a lesson learned from this project, I won't make that mistake again. I have no defence for the hand-filed gouges hidden in the openings, and not filling the grain - more lessons learned for next time there. :) Thanks for the comment!
- jacquesm 6y agoSuper job. More nitpicking: the real fanatics line up the screw heads to the geometry of the piece. For instance the Dekatrons would look nicer if the screwhead slots would form a circle too.
- zeristor 6y agoIt is known that the banana contains small amounts of radioactive postassium, perhpas it would be possible to use a banana for scale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
- dec0dedab0de 6y agothe title reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke: """They say the recipe for Sprite is lemon and lime. I tried to make it at home. There's more to it than that.""" This is awesome though, I especially like the mechanical counter.
- Animats 6y agoSteampunk was fun, but it's kind of over. I've done the brass and wood and gears thing.[1] (I miss the TechShop era. For most of the life of TechShop, I had a membership there.) [1] https://vimeo.com/124065314 https://vimeo.com/124065314
- dekhn 6y agoI wanted to work with dekatrons (my initials are dek) but the actual dekatron tubes want 300+V, which exceeds my personal comfort level. However there is a nice kit with all the necessary electronics: https://threeneurons.wordpress.com/dekatron-stuff/variable-dekatron-spinner-kit/ https://threeneurons.wordpress.com/dekatron-stuff/variable-d...
- schoen 6y agoI wonder how many people ever get to work with equipment that has the same name as they do! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism