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Open-source geiger counter about to score over $100K on Kickstarter

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:14:35 +0000

A limited edition run of the open-source geiger counter designed by Xbox hacker and Chumby co-founder, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, is about to score over $100,000 on Kickstarter in less than an hour. Huang designed the geiger counter as a way to help citizens in Japan detect radiation in the wake of the nuclear disaster in the face of a lack of reliable, official data.

The funding will go to the Safecast group, which has been creating an open source data base of radiation contamination for the people impacted by Fukushima (they’ve got 3 million data points). Geiger manufacturer International Medcom has agreed to start producing the design. You need to pledge at least $400 to get one of the limited geiger counters, and $7,500 will get you a tour around the areas in Japan with Safecast.

After several iterations of the geiger counter, Huang designed the tool to be “suitable for everyday civilian use,” affordable, intuitive, easy to use and “sufficiently stylish,” he wrote earlier this year. The final design includes:

Extensive logging capabilities
The ability to work in scenarios where Internet and power have been out for days
A sensor that can detect all three forms of radiation (Alpha, Beta and Gamma)
450 mAh Li-poly battery
Accelerometer so sensor orientation can be recorded
128×128 color OLED display
microUSB port for charging and data upload interface

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The Geigergram: hip in the age of nuclear fallout

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 01 May 2012 16:16:30 +0000

Japan is even hip when it comes to nuclear fallout. Gawker reports on the Gamma Watch Squadron, a crew led by a Japanese rapper that takes Instagram photos of elevated Geiger counter readings in public places around Fukushima.

The group’s work taps into the nation’s fears about the after effects of the Fukushima disaster, and the government and the national media’s inattention on the issue of continued nuclear exposure. The series also shows how Geiger counters are becoming a common everyday object for some Japanese in the Fukushima region.

This grassroots type of action around the issue of nuclear fallout isn’t uncommon in Japan in the wake of Fukushima. Last month I wrote about how Xbox hacker and co-founder of the Chumby project, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, had designed an open-source Geiger counter for Japanese citizens. Huang designed the Geiger counter to be “suitable for everyday civilian use,” affordable, intuitive, easy to use and “sufficiently stylish.”

Instagram’s rapid growth, clean and simple design aesthetic, and emotion-focused medium make it the natural fit for a project like this. As Om put it recently, Instagram was partly bought by Facebook for its “passionate community” and the fact that it is “all soul and emotion.” Documenting life under potential nuclear fallout in the Fukushima area is about as emotional as you can get.

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Xbox & Chumby hacker designs open-source Geiger counter

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:00:58 +0000

Xbox hacker and co-founder of the Chumby project, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, has designed an open-source Geiger counter to help citizens in Japan detect radiation in the wake of the nuclear disaster, Huang writes on his blog. After several design iterations, Huang writes that he created a Geiger-counter design that he wanted to be “suitable for everyday civilian use,” affordable, intuitive, easy to use and “sufficiently stylish.”

Above is the final design, and to the right, one of the prototypes. The final design includes:

Extensive logging capabilities
The ability to work in scenarios where Internet and power have been out for days
A sensor that can detect all three forms of radiation.

(It doesn’t have a radio (wireless capabilities).)

Huang says he doesn’t plan on manufacturing the Geiger counter, but has donated the design to the community (and open-sourced it), and that means a long-time Geiger counter maker International Medcom will be able to commercialize the product if they choose. Huang says it cost $3,000 to make the design and the two prototypes. Not bad.

Some of the designs that Huang abandoned I’ve included below:

Images courtesy of Bunnie Huang.

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Turn your iDevice into a sophisticated clock with TimeCommand

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:06:28 +0000

I’ve always been intrigued by gadgets like the Chumby that you can program to display news, weather, and other content in real-time. But I’ve never found such devices quite compelling enough to spend money on, and since I already have an iPad and a smartphone, I have enough other ways of looking at such apps already.

So for people like me, the folks at Stem Innovation have come up with the TimeCommand, which will let you turn your iPod, iPhone or iPad into a Chumby-like device, and charge it at the same time. By itself, the TimeCommand is a perfectly acceptable dual alarm clock with dimmable display. Plug in an iDevice running the free Stem:Connect app, and it can wake you to music or Internet radio, or even turn on a lamp. It has a snooze feature and a battery backup, too, in case the power goes out.

Stem:Connnect won’t show you the latest news, but you can choose your music, adjust the sound, set an alarm, dim the display, and check the weather without leaving the app. The app also includes a graphic equalizer to let you tweak the dock’s sound, which I found performed well, both for playing music and for voice conversations using an app like Bria. The TimeCommand’s round shape is useful for being able to see its clock from various angles, too.

I tried using the TimeCommand with both an iPad and an iPod touch, and found that it interacted well with both. The app has been designed for both screen sizes. Even the dock connector itself can move enough to work without taking your iDevice out of its case (depending on the case’s thickness, of course). It even works with other iPods, like the nano, though obviously you can’t use the iOS app with these.

My only complaint is one that isn’t really the TimeCommand’s fault. It gets its time from the iDevice, and updates itself automatically when docked. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi iPads and iPod touches have no way of maintaining accurate time from an online server, so you’ll need to make sure the device is set correctly.

The TimeCommand is available for $99, which is a little pricey — you could buy a Chumby One for less than that — but if you already have an iDevice, the TimeCommand might be a useful place to park it, by your bed or your easy chair.

Disclaimer: The TimeCommand was provided to us by the manufacturer for the purposes of this review.

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Google’s Chrome OS: Dead Before Arrival?

David Card — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 22:00:57 +0000

Last week Google showed off its progress on Chrome OS. It introduced an apps store in support of it, and offered up a pre-release hardware trial program as a concession that real machines wouldn’t ship till mid 2011. But it’s likely all for naught. Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s objective of making Chrome OS a “viable third choice” in desktop operating systems looks doomed.

Chumby and Broadcom Hope to Bring the Web to TV

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:32:00 +0000

Broadcom said today that it would make sure content from Chumby, a nascent widget syndication effort for televisions, would run on its chips for digital televisions and set-top boxes. Shriraj Gaglani, a senior director of business development for Broadcom, thinks Chumby will get consumers psyched about accessing the web through their TVs.

He likens the Chumby platform to a cell phone’s application store and says, “What we’ve felt we lacked in the ecosystem is the critical mass of apps and services that can leverage broadband televisions.”

For anyone who recalls the Chumby as a countertop device for accessing widgets, you’re thinking of the right company. It’s merely joining a growing pack of those looking expand its efforts beyond hardware to become a platform. In January it signed a similar integration deal with Marvell to get its widget platform onto digital picture frames. For more on bringing the web to televisions check out the full story on GigaOM.

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Chipmakers Hope Widgets Bring the Web to TV

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:30:43 +0000

Broadcom said today that it would make sure content from Chumby, a nascent widget syndication effort for televisions, would run on its chips. It’s one of a handful of integration deals Broadcom has inked with software vendors to port their content to its chips. As broadband reaches more devices, deals between chipmakers and software vendors like these are becoming increasingly important.

Such heightened integration efforts are a natural outgrowth of adding broadband to phones, TVs, set-top boxes or even picture frames, because when you add broadband, you add the Internet. And as the mobile world has shown, no one wants a bastardized version of a “mobile web” or a “TV web;” they want the real deal. So that means the chips powering these devices need to be smarter, and have the right software to deliver a web-like experience on a screen that doesn’t belong to the PC.

Other examples on the TV side include Intel teaming up with Yahoo to deliver Yahoo’s television widget platform on the chip giant’s semiconductors for set-top boxes. Sigma Designs, a competitor in the digital television space, also has a deal to port Flash Lite properly to its chips. Broadcom does, too.

With that in mind, Broadcom’s decision to add Chumby is a nice way for the platform to gain traction in TVs or in set-top boxes, because it won’t have to go to each television maker to get integrated into the device (though notably the TV makers can disable the Chumby integration on their Broadcom chips if they feel like it).

Shriraj Gaglani, a senior director of business development for Broadcom, also thinks Chumby will get consumers psyched about accessing the web through their TVs. He likens the Chumby platform to a cell phone’s application store and says, “What we’ve felt we lacked in the ecosystem is the critical mass of apps and services that can leverage broadband televisions.”

I’m not sure if an App Store-like option will make the difference given that most consumers in the U.S. get their TV programming and set-top boxes from a cable provider that may disable such functionality. Broadcom has integrated other platforms on its DTV and set-top box chips but cannot disclose them. When I asked if Broadcom was integrating any platforms built by MSOs or carriers into its chips, Gaglani declined to discuss it.

Aside from making a bet on delivering the web to televisions, this deal underlies the prominence of Adobe’s Flash platform for viewing video online. When asked if Broadcom has any integration deals with Microsoft’s Silverlight platform (a competitor to Flash), Gaglani said, “We don’t have anything to announce on that.”

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