Planet Arduino

In case your blissfully unaware of the radiation levels in your own home and city, did you know you can buy Arduino compatible Geiger Counters? They aren’t even that expensive! But, like any Arduino compatible board –they need a bit of dressing up to look like the real deal. [Folkert van Heusden] shows us his design, complete with directional LEDs and a laser cut enclosure.

He bought his first Geiger counter module a few years ago from Sparkfun — they retail for about 150 bones so they aren’t exactly cheap. But then he found an equivalent one on Aliexpres for about a quarter the cost — what did he have to lose? Really, he just wanted a cheap one he could walk around with and maybe scare his coworkers. 

Using his trusty laser cutter, he built an enclosure for the board and his Arduino. Then he populated it with LEDs to display more information. A nice big 7-segment display shows off the number of radioactive particles detected in the past hour, and past minute, and an LED bar display shows the count to the last second — i.e. if this thing is fully lit up you’d probably better get out of there!

Curious to learn more about radiation? [Veritasium] filmed an excellent adventure — to some of the most radioactive places on earth.

We’ve seen lots of Geiger counter builds over the years, and one of our favorites is this solid state version [Toumal] built.