A simple Geiger–Mueller Counter for the Detection of Ionizing Radiation
Please see subdirectory schematics.
The Controller Board contains an 8-bit ATtiny2313 microcontroller from Atmel (nowadays Microchip) and a buzzer. For counting, the output of the Tube Board is connected to one of the microcontroller's external interrupt pins. In addition, the microcontroller is equipped with a USB interface.
The High-Voltage Board contains a DC/DC converter to generate the 400 V operating voltage for the tube by means of an MC34063A switching regulator.
The Tube Board simply connects the tube (Si-39G) itself and generates the 5 V pulses for the Controller Board.
The overall Geiger-Mueller Counter is based on three software parts. The firmware (subdirectory firmware) runs on the microcontroller. It counts and communicates with the computer via USB. A command line tool (subdirectory usb_command) handles the USB communication on the computer side. Both parts of software are mainly based on the V-USB library. An additional graphical user interface (subdirectory gui) written in C# executes the command line tool (usb_command.exe) every second and plots the counts per second. This GUI application utilizes the ZedGraph library for plotting the data.
For the demonstration video a slightly radioactive metaautunite/uranocircite has been used.
