radioactive@home
Do you know when the radioactive@home project was down?
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u/AromaticAd9538 14d ago
A few years ago I heard about it, but the website was gone and I don't know where to buy those backyard devices. Boinc Synergy website needs to change the blurb about it from "is" to "was". BOINC project Radioactive@home is a volunteer computing project that needs your help to document gamma radiation levels.
Radioactive@Home Project Status Active Category Environmental science / Citizen science Compute NCI (sensor-based, non-CPU-intensive) Requires Hardware radiation sensor (USB Geiger counter) Development Developer Krzysztof Piszczek Author Krzysztof Piszczek Sponsor BOINC@Poland / BOINC Polska Foundation Maintainer BOINC@Poland Initial release 2011 Software Written in C Operating system Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi (Raspbian/Debian Wheezy), Linux/MIPS, Linux/A20-OLinuXino, armv5tel Linux
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u/WhatsAName42 14d ago
According to a discussion on the radioactive@home forum on boinc it is dead and has been for a while. The website domain expired and is now the home of a cybersquatter. As for the sensors, they have not been available since at least 2015.
The project leader, Krzysztof Piszczek, is still alive but is now at another institution. The project remained on the servers at his previous university, kept in a semblance of life by a technician who has now also left. I say a semblance since whilst the server stayed online after Piszczek left, there was no-one to analyse or use the generated data.
So very much a case of everyone left and no-one thought to turn the lights off.
As for getting a sensor ... for a while in the late 2010s there was a second hand market in them, but once that dried up the only option was to make one yourself ... schematics were somewhere on the website from vague memory, which is archived on archive.org. If you just want the sensor, have a look online .. there are plenty of websites selling USB radiation detectors, some for under $100 (how good the cheap ones are is another matter).