Muon detector hardware for displaying the presence of cosmic rays

stop we have Paul Schultz talking about a very interesting looking piece of hardware so I'm not going to say anymore I'll let him get on with it thanks John thank you I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail about things I'm going to be talking about on Wednesday so Wednesday morning after the keynote is my actual talk hope there's another talk on at the same time called everyone gets a pony don't go there anyway thank you very much so what I'm talking about is this little little device here as part of a an art installation in Adelaide we built 16 of these and it's a muon detector or a cosmic ray which which ones are particles that are produced in the atmosphere from cosmic rays and essentially that that's the picture you see there that you've got particles coming from space they hit our atmosphere and then spread out and we've got them the deep tech to set up the detect them and then they play sound and and maybe log an event or and flash a light there were the conspirators involved so myself Robert Hart was the main person who built these this was his third device from measuring muons he's sort of a hobby of his that he's been involved in and I'll explain that the units of it in a sec and then we also had an artist Daren cousins who sort of was the producer of the particular installation that we did and as you can see there we were set up on the banks of the torrents in Adelaide and I'll I've got a video that will so I can show you if you're interested come and see me otherwise come to the talk which shows it at the evening it's at that night it was actually quite spectacular as well worth coming to see and this sort of another photo on the banks of the torrents at night and you can sort of see two of them they're lit up green and red what we were doing was so the winner when a new one is detected it'll initiate a color or an a sound and the colors will indicate and you'll see in a sec which direction the events have came from and one of the other things we did was push it that event out onto the network and then Darren had a program that would sniff those receive those UDP packets and then run it through a MIDI device and produce audio as well so it's is quite immersive inside this box we've got a couple of boards the main board in the middle there was a custom built board that Robert made digi-key did that was where we got it manufactured I went through eight iterations that was the eighth one right at the bottom most three tubes they're in copper and you're more than welcome to come up and have a look approach me at some stage are the actual tubes that are used the geiger tubes so as a particle flows through them they register and trigger and that's what and we look for two out of those three to register an event and that's what's happening here so even so those those are events being triggered by muons generated high up in the atmosphere coming down to us I will talk about that later this is Robert's usual circuit he's done this a few times now and that's the one that we thought he uses so this for a double double detector situation you've got the tubes on the left the the pulse that comes in is called negative pulses cause when a particle ionisers a gas in the in the in the geiger tubes which is at 400 volts that's shaped and then there's some additional on the right hand side there is coincidence detection so we only we're looking for events in two tubes that happen simultaneously and that's the circuit that does that that's not what we ended up building believe it or not this one's actually a lot it was designed to be a lot of slips simpler and cheaper to make we get on the left oh that was so these these circuits here were replaced by some 555 timers I can't say no a whole lot about them other than it was a simpler setup for him to make and actually caused us a bit of trouble as well but I mean the main issues that we had with the with the the project work was self-inflicted in one sense and we've tried to simplify things make things cheaper and it caused us a little bit of trouble but we got there so this is one of the prototypes you can see the two tubes on the top there's circuits inside and that was a sort of picture of the board on the going from left to right you've got the the parts that measure that negative pulse off the from the tubes in the middle part is a at least five five timers that do the simultaneous events and turn the three the the pulses from three tubes into a red green or blue depending on which of the which pairs of the three tubes we actually um registers all right people recognize that one so that's a Raspberry Pi zero Wireless when the de board was originally designed Robert the idea was that we would the audio would be produced by some mechanical means so weather chime bars or something hitting something else so the original idea was to drive something mechanical with 12 volts one of the things that the will that we did was put this project up on hackaday some people might have seen it there one of one of the reasons for doing that is that they have their competitions each year and you can actually win some money and and put it towards the project and one of the one of the reasons we didn't go down the way of the mechanical actuators was so that we could enter one of those categories and by putting a Raspberry Pi inside we went to we went the IOT Internet of Things category which actually caused us some problems but it meant we could get some money so it's kind of one of the things you'll you notice about we put the we put the Raspberry Pi in there so that actually we could use that to drive the audio what do you think one of the things you might notice about the Raspberry Pi zero is it doesn't actually have any audio on it which is the small short shortcomings but um we ended up building a the audio circuitry separately including it so this is very similar to the the audio circuits that are the way they've done on the full Raspberry Pi it uses the PWM output and there's some light there's some software that you can put in that when the Linux kernel boots that runs the PWM outputs in the same way as the full Raspberry Pi 3 put it through a an amplifier with some filter circuits and you can get audio out so that was one fix what else can I tell you about the the board so maybe just describing some of the other boards in there so you've got the Raspberry Pi 0 there you've got the main board in the middle the board on the left hand side is the 400 volt power supply for the tubes and then on the next to the chip down the bottom there on the right is the amplifier circuit for the the audio with the speakers right down the bottom this was we've had we'd had the the installation on the riverbank in Adelaide we had the make affair we set up set ourselves up for that and you can sort of see one of them going off there that was in a bit reasonably large factory area that we've got for for that the old Mitsubishi car maker in Adelaide we use that space and we actually one the best backyard science category for that so we're doing not to doing too badly what else do you do when you've got 16 of these things who anyone's interested in n1 and would like to purchase one we're selling them so that we can actually make a next version Christmas lights so that's my house come Christmas time like not quite well that the LEDs inside so we can take that off the LED stripping on the top there so I've got some LED Christmas lights in my place there is another project so if we with the intent of selling them with theirs we've had one person interested who's a tinkerer and up in Queensland we'd like to make a little bit more commercial that I mean Roberts done an excellent job with the packaging and the the waterproofing they actually waterproof and they can leave them outside so they could make a really nice garden ornament we'd like to get schools interested it's a good explanation of particle physics and the world around us there's a project in Europe called cosmic pie and we were looking at porting there so this is their their web front-end for their particular detector which uses solid-state particle detectors and so I'm sort of in the process now of porting that over to the to our Raspberry Pi and one of the for instance one of the things I've added this is just a screen shot is for instance of the plugins so this this page is something that I've done on top of their software but I haven't sort of rebadged it yet so there there are some of the things that we did with this piece of hardware any questions yes so if you go yes so you more than welcome to come up and have a look if I go to the way you've got the three so they're sort of standing on in so it's a bit hard to see but they're three geiger tubes we're looking for simultaneous events on two of those and that gives us one two or three channels depending on which pair trigger at the same time and we've mapped that to red green and blue so when you go back to so that picture if you see a whole bunch if several trigger at once and they're red you kind of get some sort of idea of the direction that that particular event is coming from was the idea behind that yes previous projects that have been built used horizontal tubes and there's something different that we wanted to try and it gives more and gives a sort of azimuth instead of elevation yes oh well we came first in the IIT but we lost out the overall year prize to a submersible because we don't do too well in water yeah something like that but I mean Roberts like that's what he does and he does it really well so if yes and learning to that if you're interested at all about what it is it's just cosmic array on the packet a website you can get all the details and those photos and logs and everything everything's up on the everything's up there and all the code so the the purpose of the the Raspberry Pi was for two things one was to play the sounds and then also to transmit events over the network and that was what I did and rather than go go - maybe libraries I ended up looking up you know info pages on TCP the examples and they just trigger on an event using pi using wiry warring PI protocol and then just send it out to the network or play the audio so this it's not particularly tricky but it works yes I I haven't seen that yet oh yeah yeah oh so just after you use I've got about ten days of recording of the of the events and I was um I fired up I people don't know I Python is an interactive Python there's graphing stuff and again I'll show a graph but the other talk but it it just looks random I haven't seen any trends yet but oh yeah well that's that's that solar lets but these aren't from the Sun these are I mean the things that do affect the right latitude because of the Earth's magnetic field apparently east to west because of like maybe that's the day because of the Earth's rotation yeah well the people might have heard of the this what they did with the Great Pyramid in December looking at they were using neons from cosmic rays to detect cavities inside the inside the pyramid and I believe they were they weren't so much using the Geiger tubes but solid-state detectors which is what we want to do with the next version yeah yep so what is it yeah well I was there was so the I've got this now what do you do with it I've actually got the script that will generate Bitcoin key it's not kick well the wallet keys private keys because you can do that with 99 d6 rolls right so you can feed that or just generate that and you can feed that into one of the paper wallet generators to get a private and public keys so yeah [Applause]

Channel: LinuxConfAu 2018 - Sydney, Australia

Views: 1,223

Keywords: lca, lca2018, #linux.conf.au#linux#foss#opensource, PaulSchulz

Id: rBFftswubwQ

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018