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Category Archives: radiation
Warwalking For Radiation
Can’t find a recently updated survey of radioactivity in your neighborhood? Try [Hunter Long]’s DIY scintillation counter warwalking rig. (Video also embedded below.) What looks like a paint can with a BNC cable leading to an unassuming grey box is actually a complete kit for radiation surveying.
Inside the metal …read more
A Cheap And Cheerful Geiger Counter Build
Hackers often have broad interests across the sciences, of which nuclear topics are no exception. The Geiger counter remains a popular build, and could be a handy tool to have in a time of rising tensions between nuclear powers. [Leonora Tindall] had tinkered with basic units, but wanted a better …read more
Posted in geiger, geiger counter, radiation, radiation monitoring, science
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Echos of the Cold War: Nuclear-Powered Missiles Have Been Tried Before
On August 8th, an experimental nuclear device exploded at a military test facility in Nyonoksa, Russia. Thirty kilometers away, radiation levels in the city of Severodvinsk reportedly peaked at twenty times normal levels for the span of a few hours. Rumors began circulating about the severity of the event, and …read more
Fail of the Week: Spinning the Pripyat Ferris Wheel
This multifaceted fail comes to us straight from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where a group of friends apparently decided that a fun weekend project would be trying to turn over the iconic ferris wheel in the Pripyat Amusement Park. The [Kreosan] crew documented their admittedly very creative attempt at suicide …read more
Posted in Chernobyl, Exclusion Zone, misc hacks, Pripyat, radiation, urban exploration
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A Very Different ‘Hot Or Not’ Application For Your Phone
Radioactivity stirs up a lot of anxiety, partially because ionizing radiation is undetectable by any of the senses we were born with. Anytime radiation makes the news, there is a surge of people worried about their exposure levels and a lack of quick and accurate answers. Doctors are flooded with calls, detection devices become scarce, and fraudsters swoop in to make a quick buck. Recognizing the need for a better way, researchers are devising methods to measure cumulative exposure experienced by commodity surface mount resistors.
Cumulative exposure is typically tracked by wearing a dosimeter a.k.a. “radiation badge”. It is standard …read more
Circuit VR: Redundant Flip Flops and Voting Logic
We are somewhat spoiled because electronics today are very reliable compared to even a few decades ago. Most modern electronics obey the bathtub curve. If they don’t fail right away, they won’t fail for a very long time, in all likelihood. However, there are a few cases where that’s not a good enough answer. One is when something really important is at stake — the control systems of an airplane, for example. The other is when you are in an environment that might cause failures. In those cases — near a nuclear reactor or space, for example, you often are …read more
Posted in flip-flop, fpga, Hackaday Columns, radiation, redundancy, Skills, tmr, triple module redundancy
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See the Radioactive World with This Peltier Cloud Chamber
Remember when a homemade cloud chamber was a science fair staple? We haven’t participated for decades, but it seemed like every year someone would put a hunk of dry ice in a fish tank, add a little alcohol, and with the lighting just right – which it never was in the gymnasium – you might be lucky enough to see a few contrails in the supersaturated vapor as the occasional stray bit of background radiation whizzed through the apparatus.
Done right, the classic cloud chamber is a great demonstration, but stocking enough dry ice to keep the fun going is …read more
The Electronics of Cold War Nightmares
It is a good bet that if you look around you, you’ll be able to find at least one smoke detector in sight. If not, there’s probably one not too far away. Why not? Fires happen and you’d like to know about a fire even if you are sleeping or alert others if you are away. During the cold war, there were other things that people didn’t want to sleep through. [Msylvain59] tears down two examples: a Soviet GSP-11 nerve agent detector and a Polish RS-70 radiation alarm. You can see both videos, below.
In all fairness, the GSP-11 is …read more
Posted in geiger, nerve agent, nerve gas, radiation, russian, teardown, USSR
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A Vacuum Tube and Barbecue Lighter X-Ray Generator
A certain subset of readers will remember a time when common knowledge held that sitting too close to the TV put you in mortal peril. We were warned to stay at least six feet back to avoid the X-rays supposedly pouring forth from the screen. Nobody but our moms believed it, so there we sat, transfixed and mere inches from the Radiation King, working on our tans as we caught up on the latest cartoons. We all grew up mostly OK, so it must have been a hoax.
Or was it? It turns out that getting X-rays from vacuum tubes …read more
Posted in high voltage, misc hacks, piezoelectric, radiation, rectifier, x-ray
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Harvesting Energy from the Earth with Quantum Tunneling
More energy hits the earth in sunlight every day than humanity could use in about 16,000 years or so, but that hasn’t stopped us from trying to tap into other sources of energy too. One source that shows promise is geothermal, but these methods have been hindered by large startup costs and other engineering challenges. A new way to tap into this energy source has been found however, which relies on capturing the infrared radiation that the Earth continuously gives off rather than digging large holes and using heat exchangers.
This energy is the thermal radiation that virtually everything gives …read more
Posted in infrared, quantum, radiation, tunneling
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