Another Great Kickstarter Project To Measure Japan Radiation

Many of you are probably familiar with the DIY geiger counter Kickstarter project from the people over at Safecast.org. In cooperation with Tokyo Hackerspace, the $36,900 they raised was used build geiger counters that since April 16 have collected over 250,000 data points. Today I came across a similar project that’s also worthy of attention: the Smart Radiation Detector project.

This project, organized by Radiation-watch.org, takes a slightly different approach, connecting a small radiation detector via your iPhone’s audio jack:

We are going to manufacture and sell the Smart Radiation Detector connected with iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad via microphone input, at a low price less than fifty dollars by using cheap PIN Photo-diode instead of expensive Geiger-Muller Tube to detect beta and gamma radiation. The actual electronic circuit is so simply it fits inside a match box or a FRISK mint-box, without battery.

The resultant device uses an iOS app, of which there are free and pro versions – though I’m puzzled as to why they’d restrict features in the free version. I’m not sure if there is any plan to build in a “send data to Pachube” feature, but I think that it would certainly be helpful to get more readings into that pool.

In any case, it looks like a worthwhile project so if you’d like to spare a few of your summer beer dollars, this wouldn’t be a bad idea. You can find out more information about Smart Radiation Detector in the video below, or in this presentation.

[h/t to Gizmodo]