There are at least three of our distributors working against the clock to create new geiger shields in an attempt to provide people in Japan with tools for self-measuring radiation levels as we have been reporting earlier. Libelium, from Zaragoza, Spain, released one yesterday with one of the most comprehensive guides I have seen so far to how a geiger counter works, how to measure, and how to connect it to an Arduino board.

(c) 2011 geiger sensor, picture by Libelium.com

Libelium’s work in this case could almost be considered political, here their manifesto:

The main finality of the Radiation Sensor Board for Arduino is to help people in Japan to measure the levels of radiation in their everyday life after the unfortunate earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in March 2011 and cause the nuclear radiation leakages in Fukushima. We want to give the chance to measure by themselves this levels instead of trusting in the general advises which are being broadcasted. The usage of this sensor board along with the affordable and easy to use Arduino platform helps people to get radiation values from specific places.

As technical guys, we feel the responsibility of providing our support in those areas where we can contribute. As a result, first batch has been shipped to Japan at no charge to the Tokyo Hackerspace and other working groups.

The design of the board is open hardware and the source code is released under GPL.

The Libelium Team. April 2011.

In parallel to the effort to provide people with Hardware, Shigeru Kobayashi is working in creating a central point of information on where to find sensors, and how to send the information to the net and make it available for the rest of us. We will come back with more information about this soon.

Read more at Libelium’s page, where you can also acquire the sensor.