Planet Arduino

We don’t know why [stoppi71] needs to do gamma spectroscopy. We only know that he has made one, including a high-voltage power supply, a photomultiplier tube, and–what else–an Arduino. You also need a scintillation crystal to convert the gamma rays to visible light for the tube to pick up.

He started out using an open source multichannel analyzer (MCA) called Theremino. This connects through a sound card and runs on a PC. However, he wanted to roll his own and did so with some simple circuitry and an Arduino.

The tube detects very faint light in the crystal so they need to be in a light-tight enclosure. The Arduino needs a little help to read the pulses from the tube in the form of a simple circuit. The circuit acts as a peak detector and the peaks last only about twenty microseconds. The post doesn’t have the schematic for the peak detector but the video, seen below, does.

If you want a run down on spectrometer projects, check out Hacklet 122. Admittedly, most of the ones we see rely on visible light.

by physicsenthusiast:

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build a device that lets you feel radiation in your vicinity on your fingertips, and, if tuned well, feel cosmic rays passing through your hands. You will build it starting only with Geiger Muller tubes, fairly standard electronics components, and RFDuinos. The basic steps are to create a high voltage supply in which to suspend your tubes, process pulses from your tubes and feed them into an RFduino, and then use RFduino’s GZL library to radio events to a glove with vibrating motors attached to the fingertips. (RFDuino also makes it very easy to read data into an iPhone app, if you feel like going further).

Networked Cosmic Ray Detector: Feel Radiation on your Fingertips - [Link]

We’re assuming [Toumal] was desperately bored one day, because in the depths of the Internet he found some really cool components to build a solid state Geiger counter.

The Arduino and touchscreen are rather standard fare [Toumal] picked up on eBay for about $30. What really sets this project apart from all the other geiger counter builds we’ve seen is the solid state geiger counter [Toumal] used. This device uses a specially-made photodiode made by First Sensor to detect gamma emissions from 5 to 1000 keV.

[Toumal] put all the software for his Arduino touch screen radiation detector up on github. To be honest, we’re really impressed with the rad sensor [Toumal] used for this project, so if you ever decide to pick one of those up, he’s got your back with an Arduino library for it.