Building the bGeigee Nano, week 2

The third week on the job was spend finishing attaching the breakouts and the headers.
One of the breakout meant to attach the Fio had to be resoldered due to an error.
A third pair of hands is indeed useful for some steps.
After 2 more hours of work, the electronic board is finished. And it works!

A few tips:
- don't forget to remove the paper under the vinyl plates like I did
- one of the standoff used for placement of the LCD can be affixed to the LCD lower left hole, giving the piece a touch more stability
- in my case, plug-in the battery was a no-return point, as it's very hard to remove it afterwards.

As usual, thanks to Leeds Hackspace for their warm welcome and help.

Building, week 1

In which buying a bGeigee in Europe is not cheap, and the build start

After two solid weeks of waiting, the kit came by UPS. With a nasty surprise. I didn't realized at the time, but you have to add value added taxes (VAT) to the total value of the package. With import taxes and insurance, I paid an extra 93.03£.

This bring the grand total to $700*, instead of the $450 announced on Amazon. We definitely need to source the parts in Europe.


Flash-forward a few month later, when I finally found time to pay a visit to Leed Hackspace.
As usual, visitors are warmly welcomed on Tuesday night, which is open night. And it was pretty busy.

For the built, I simply follow the excellent bGeigee Nano manual wiki on GitHub.
After checking that all the parts were in the kit (indeed they were) and trying to understand how the different parts where supposed to fit, I started implanting the basic components on the main board, before soldering them all in one pass, as recommended.
Here's the look of things at this stage.

I then proceeded to the soldering bench for a rehearsing crash course taught by the super-helpful Paul (thanks again), and onwards to soldering the basic components as well as the headers.
The whole thing took me about 3 hours, which is more or less what I expected.

Next, I will have to add the breakouts: Arduino, GPS, LCD, SD card reader, but that will be next week. Meanwhile, here's a picture of the studio's new 3D printer during a test run. One of the resident is currently building it.

* that is 450£, or 565€

Hello World!

A lenghty presentation of the SAFECAST project, of what I have to do with it, and of things to come.

Ever heard of SAFECAST? Before June 2014, me neither.
I discovered this awesome crowd-sourced scientific project with the presentation of Joi Ito at TED Talk.
SAFECAST was founded in the aftermath of the Fukushima triple meltdown caused by the magnitude 9.1 Tohoku earthquake that devastated the north-east coast of Japan in spring 2011.
In the aftermaths of the devastating tsunami that killed more than 16,000, the Japanese goverment was unable or unwilling to conduct the necessary radioactivity surveys that would have allowed the population living in the contaminated areas to protect themselves.
Meanwhile, a handful of techs and scientists decided to take the matter in their own hands.
SAFECAST was born.
To this day, the volunteers have released a treasure trove of informations on the radioactive contamination of Japan, developed a open source geiger-type radiation detector, the bGeigee Nano, and very recently released a OS X app that allow anyone to easily survey all the data recorded by the members of the NGO.

In 2011, I was living in Tokyo. As a (former) researcher in nuclear chemistry, having worked on the  nuclear wastes' storage issue, I was appalled by the lack of informations available.
More than 3 years after the event, I am still shocked by our collective lack of power in the face of major nuclear accident followed by a widespread contamination.
We were very lucky indeed that the amount of airborne radio-elements was low enough not to cause major fallouts in the Kanto area, where 40 millions people live and work.

Recently, a friend of mine published a very interesting calculation showing how the global risk of nuclear accident is underestimated [in French]. To summarise, the overall risk depends on the total number of powerplants in the world. He estimates that it is of about 1 per 46 years at this time. With China and India and a few others building new plants, and the reactor park of the bigger producers (US, Russia & former-USSR satellite countries, France, UK, Germany, Japan) getting old, this probability will increase with time.



Radioactivity is silent and invisible, yet can cause massive damages over a very long time. All the countries which toyed with radioactivity since the sixties got some contamination on their territory. In UK, Sellafield is contaminated. In France, there is (minor doses of) plutonium in Saclay's pond, around former uranium mines and in and around the Curie's laboratories. All over the world, radium-based paint was used in the thirties for luminescent painting.

With the occasional thieves stealing a radioactive medical source, plus a few nuclear submarines rotting away in the Baltic Sea, there are enough reason to find hotspots in unsuspected places. After the Fukushima meltdown, when radioactive surveys where finally conduced, a radioactive hotspot was found in down-town Tokyo. It was caused by long-forgotten bottles of radium paint found under the wooden flooring of an 50+ year old house. They residents have been irradiated all their life and never new anything about it.

I now live in Leeds, UK, where I moved in autumn 2013, a year ago. It is a very lively city, with an active Hackespace, several Universities, a lively startup ecosystem and a lot of interesting and interested individuals. The best place to start a new project.

Today, I bought a bGeigee Nano on Amazon. Paid in Euro, because.
361€ + 88€ of shipping, for a grand total of 449€. It does not come for cheap, but it's apparently the price it cost if you buy the pieces separately anyway. I plan to build it in Leeds Hackspace, and try to involve the guys here in the project.
I'll let you know what come of it in the next posts.