UT50 NaI Scintillation probe

August 7, 2013

I met some great people today, and I also got a wonderful device for my ongoing experiments as a gift: The UT50 Scintillation probe, manufactured by SC ICPM SA Romania. It features a huge NaI(TL) crystal, with a diameter of 5.5cm and 5.5cm length. The photomultiplier is a British EMI9656KB and the entire device is encapsulated in an aluminum modular cylinder of no more than 24cm total length and 1270g…

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AVR SDCard FAT support with FatFS

August 2, 2013

You’ve probably seen or done lots of cool microcontroller projects already, but did you ever consider adding permanent data storage to your projects? I did, and there are numerous advantages: saving data from sensors (data logger), saving configuration files, reading external content like images or songs, and so on! One thing is to connect an SD Card to an AVR microcontroller via SPI (relatively easy), a completely different thing is…

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Using FS1000A/XY-FST RF Radio module with AVRs

July 31, 2013

Wireless data transfer can be useful for a variety of projects. I stumbled upon a very low cost emitter+receiver modules pair, and planned to use it for some time now. There are a few variants available on the market, but they do quite the same thing, just the operating frequency might be different (315MHz / 418MHz / 433MHz/ 915MHz): The emitter usually has 3 pins (VCC->5V, GND, DATA), with a…

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Global radiation monitoring network

July 11, 2013

EDIT: there is a dedicated blog on this project, here. Make sure to follow it for latest news. A few days ago I announced my intention of creating my first crowd-funded project, but I didn’t tell you what was it about. Well, I’m planning quite a challenging project – to bring my uRADMonitor to a global scale, and create a network of distributed detectors, with data centralized on one server,…

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How to set the AVR Fusebits

March 11, 2013

Learn how to set your atmega to work with various external crystals, program the fusebits, and build a fusebit doctor to revive your AVRs, in case you wrote the wrong settings .

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NaI Scintillation Probe and Gamma Spectroscopy

November 29, 2010

A scintillation probe enclosing the regulated high voltage supply, the signal amplifier, the photomultiplier and the scintillation crystal (NaI). Building a DIY counter for a NaI Scintillation probe. AtMega8 and a bluetooth module for wireless data output. A cheap and easy to build homemade dosimeter with applications in spectroscopy.

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Android Bluetooth controlled robot – Part 1

November 1, 2010

Learn to connect a bluetooth module to an ATMega micro controller via the UART serial interface and even further, discover it using a bluetooth enabled Android phone. The 9600bps serial link established, can than be used to exchange data: read sensors or control the robot.

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Perseus 3 Advanced Robot (using Windows Mobile)

September 12, 2009

Perseus 3, a 4×4 advanced robot featuring an Atmega8 for sensor interfacing and motor control, and a I-mate SP5 smartphone (200MHz) running Windows Mobile 6.0 as robot’s brain. Small weight, powerful trust, and lots of features including WLAN, Bluetooth, Camera, Speaker, Phone-interface (GPRS, 3G), Microphone (for voice commands) and more.

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