MightyOhm

Shortly after my Geiger counter workshop at the Chaos Communications Camp in Germany, @tatzelbrumm sent me this video of his kit chirping madly on his flight home to the United States.

If you squint at the laptop in the video, you can see that his geiger counter is reading over 400 CPM!

Exposure to cosmic radiation is a well-known side effect of commercial airline flights, and is even documented in the xkcd radiation dose chart (click for a large version):

Christoph sent me his data logs, which clearly show the effect of altitude on radiation exposure:

The red trace is the background level on the ground in SFO and hovers around 20 CPM. The blue trace is the measured radiation over Greenland on his transatlantic flight. The peak readings are 25 times the background radiation at sea-level!

Caution: Unless you like being hassled by the TSA, I don’t recommend flying with the Geiger kit in your carry-on luggage, much less actually using it on the plane! On his DIY Geiger Counter site, Brohogan posted some good advice about traveling with a Geiger counter.

Look! Geiger Counter Kits! And shiny new cases!

Have you done something cool with your Geiger Counter kit? If so, post about it in the forums!

@tinkernut just posted a video tutorial showing how to make a wifi radio for about $50 based on my Wifi Radio project.

Here’s another neat video from Brian Stuckey of ineedcaffeine.com.

If anyone knows where to find more of these displays, I would love to get my hands on some!

Staver Electromechanical Vane / Flip 7 Segment Display from Brian Stuckey on Vimeo.

2.5 Inch Hard Drive Macro HD Video from Brian Stuckey on Vimeo.

An exposed hard drive in operation. See more here:
Hard Drive In Use Video

Sadly, there is no sound, but the video is amazing. Check out Brian’s other videos on Vimeo or at his website ineedcaffeine.com.

This weekend I hosted a post-Halloween kit building party at MightyOhm HQ.

Nine close friends built Conway’s Game of Life kits from Adafruit Industries.  This is my favorite kit for these kinds of workshops because it’s easy for beginners to complete in about 2 hours, and when everyone is done, you can wire all of the kits together to create one large cellular automata display.  The last time I helped people build this kit was at a Make:SF workshop at the TechShop in Menlo Park.

Here’s a timelapse video of the afternoon, shot with a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro webcam on an Eee PC 4G running Booru Webcam 2.0.

The capture interval was 5 seconds.  I used Quicktime Pro to stitch the images together at 15fps and iMovie to add titles and music (Turbo Outrun by FRP from remix.kwed.org.)

I wore my Halloween costume for most of the afternoon.  What am I?  Most people on the streets of San Francisco had no idea…

Safety first!

Stuart was the first to finish his kit:

Soldering the kits together to form the matrix:

Nine happy kit-builders with the 3×3 matrix they created with their finished kits:

And lastly, a video of the 3×3 matrix in action:

Three people had little to no soldering experience at the beginning of the afternoon.  Everyone who came went home with a working kit.  Success!