Safecast - Japan Radiation Monitoring

As we enter March 2014 we're facing the third year anniversary of the 3/11 Tohoku earthquake and thus the foundation of Safecast. We thought this would be a good time to both reflect on what has been done in that time as well as look to the future and what the next 3 years might bring.

On our end, we just celebrated hitting our 16 millionth data point and co-founder Joi Ito will be giving a talk next month at TED about how we started and what came of that. The bGeigie Nano kits that we developed have been very popular and enabled that huge spike in data points now coming in from all corners of the earth including Antartica and Sudan - places we never imaged collecting data.

In Tokyo on March 15 & 16 we're hosting a series of talks on this "what happens next" topic and thinking about everything from sustainability of this project, to black swan events that are hard to predict but come with huge concequences. On Saturday we'll be at Tokyo University and on Sunday we'll be back at our offices in Shibuya. On Sunday we'll also host a global hackathon to update the website and fine tune our online offerings. If you'd like to join, or help out from afar please join the Safecast hackathons mailing list which can be found here.

We're also hoping to host our first US events in the following months, it's looking like DC in April, and Los Angeles shortly there after. If you are in those areas and want to help out please stay tuned.

Once again, thank you for all your support. We really couldn't have pulled this off without it.

As those of you who have been following Safecast for a while know, the "bGeigie" is the radiation monitoring platform we developed specifically to take readings while mobile -be that in a car, on a bike, or walking. Since the beginning of Safecast our volunteer force has been restricted not by interested people, but in devices to let them use. We just couldn't make enough fast enough. Over the last 2 years we've been refining the bGeigie platform again and again, with the intention of making is small enough that anyone could carry one around, and simple enough that it could be built in a few hours by anyone with a soldering iron. The bGeigie Nano is the results of those efforts, and it's the workhorse device the entire Safecast team relies on now. Together with our hardware partner International Medcom we're excited to release the bGeigie Nano kit. 

With a 2" pancake sensor, onboard GPS, data logging, and everything else the Nano without question our favorite tool in the Safecast aresenal. We recently held a build party in Aizu, Fukushima and built 13 of them in a weekend with the help of a team of volunteers - many of whome had never picked up a soldering iron before. The kit isn't cheap - but it's not designed to be a low cost solution. It's designed to be the best device we could imagine making, and it collects reliable accurate data configured perfectly for the Safecast dataset. This kit allows anyone in the world to take mobile readings and submit them back to to us. It's only been available for a month but we've already had a number of organizations buy several kits for their teams around the world as well as over 50 individuals who otherwise wouldn't have had access to this equipment. We're expecting to see data from Sudan and several parts of Russia soon.

This is a huge step for us and we're very excited to see how this helps us fill in some of the harder to reach gaps in the Safecast map and dataset.

Links:

• bGeigie Nano Kit Order Info