| Hacking a Geiger Counter in the Middle of a Nuclear Disaster | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Thursday, 24 March 2011 | |
| I'm sure a lot of you reading this are familiar with the situation in Japan right now. A horrible earthquake and tsunami occurred and along with all the destruction, it also caused a meltdown at a nuclear reactor near Tokyo. Since then, Tokyo has been suffering from nuclear fallout and tainted food and water. As of this post, we've just been informed that the tap water in Tokyo is tainted with radiation, there seems to have been a run on bottled water, and the situation is getting very disturbing (as if a nuclear meltdown in your backyard is not disturbing enough). The day after the nuclear problems started occurring at the plant, geiger counters started popping up on Ustream. After that, Pachube set up special accounts for radiation data feeds in Japan (thank you Pachube). Unfortunately, geiger counters were sold out everywhere. The fear of nuclear disaster and radiation spread internationally and there was a run on geiger counters. Luckily, Tokyo Hackerspace was able to obtain two of them from Reuseum . They had actually bent over backwards getting them to us quickly and was calling their warehouse for stock and UPS and FedEx to see who would still deliver to Japan. We received them two days ago and I brought them to Tokyo Hackerspace yesterday to show people how to use it. We're keeping one at the space so that people can borrow it to check out their living area and reassure their families that its safe. Here's a pic of me scanning Karamoon , another Tokyo Hackerspace member. His head was looking very suspicious...
I wanted to put the other geiger counter up publicly and as quickly as possible to share the data with others in Tokyo. Unfortunately, the geiger counters are completely analog and there was no way to pull data from it. So, being the nerd that I am, I proceeded to hack it into what I wanted. These are the project details of the process of converting a cold-war era, analog geiger counter into a device that can digitally send data to Pachube, a public sensor feed aggregator. |
Read More...
http://freaklabs.org/index.php/Blog/Misc/Hacking-a-Geiger-Counter.html
- Hacking a Geiger Counter in the Middle of a Nuclear Disaster
- Geiger Counter - Google Search
- Geiger counter A/D conversion for radiation level crowdsourcing - Hack a Day
- Freaklabs - Open Source Wireless - Hacking a Geiger Counter in the Middle of a Nuclear Disaster
- Tokyo Hackerspace helping disaster victims - Hack a Day
- The Reuseum
- Calling all .jp users - distributed radiation sensing & geiger counters | pachube.community
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