Safecast - Japan Radiation Monitoring

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