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Related: upcycling an expired smoke detector's ionisation chamber into a Quantum Random Number Generator [1]. I don't see a schematic unfortunately. Make sure t

Related: upcycling an expired smoke detector's ionisation chamber into a Quantum Random Number Generator [1]. I don't see a schematic unfortunately. Make sure to read the comments section about using single versus pairs of decay events in the thread that Don Froula started. I fantasize about collecting all the ionisation chambers being tossed in my city and first rigging up a massive Redundant Array of Inexpensive RNG's out of them, then upcycling them into home-based RNG appliances to sell to people to plug in that hand out hotbits over the wire, public and private WiFi and Bluetooth to create a mesh of hotbits anywhere you walk around to grab through a protocol that mixes hotbits from these appliances and public RAIR's. Then we could be awash in randomness data to use anytime we wanted, from a highly-distributed mesh. [1] https://hackaday.io/project/180445-qrng https://hackaday.io/project/180445-qrng

eternityforest 4y ago
Kind of like a distributed league of entropy? Seems a bit impractical and overkill, but also extremely awesome. Maybe we could somehow get a Bluetooth broadcast data manufacturer code reserved for just spewing randomness. Not at all secure, but if you mix it with a good mixer it can't hurt, and it can't be hacked by anyone out of state, or out of the 800ft range if they lack a giant antenna. Maybe a really simple network random protocol could be defined. Just a UDP packet where you send N bytes of entropy, the receiver mixes it in their state, and sends you back N bytes. Randomly once every 60 minutes you multicast 32 bytes. I'd prefer as few americium sources around as absolutely needed for fire safety though, but maybe it's better than where they normally go(The trash, I'd imagine, whether or not that's legal). Maybe half silvered mirrors and avalanche diodes? Raw unprocessed live quantum bits as a service are pretty cool for non-security related things too.

eternityforest 4y ago

Kind of like a distributed league of entropy? Seems a bit impractical and overkill, but also extremely awesome. Maybe we could somehow get a Bluetooth broadcast data manufacturer code reserved for just spewing randomness. Not at all secure, but if you mix it with a good mixer it can't hurt, and it can't be hacked by anyone out of state, or out of the 800ft range if they lack a giant antenna. Maybe a really simple network random protocol could be defined. Just a UDP packet where you send N bytes of entropy, the receiver mixes it in their state, and sends you back N bytes. Randomly once every 60 minutes you multicast 32 bytes. I'd prefer as few americium sources around as absolutely needed for fire safety though, but maybe it's better than where they normally go(The trash, I'd imagine, whether or not that's legal). Maybe half silvered mirrors and avalanche diodes? Raw unprocessed live quantum bits as a service are pretty cool for non-security related things too.