DIY Smart Gadget Sniffs the Air, Tells You How Healthy It Is

The world of the Internet of Things is more than just beautifully designed gadgets with circuitry that can receive and execute commands remotely. And it’s not just smart watches, connected HVAC systems, intelligent light-bulbs, coffee makers and doorbells either. It is also a world where do-it-yourself, one-person projects are often exposed to a small community of enthusiasts.

Radu Motisan, a Romanian software engineer, designed an open-source IoT platform anyone can use to build their own dosimeter, a device that measures radiation in a given area. The gadget has a strong focus on monitoring air quality but it supports multiple types of sensors, from the Geiger-Muller tube for gamma and hard beta radiation, to the BME280 environmental sensor that reports levels for temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, dust or ultraviolet intensity.

The project, a contender to the 2017 Hackaday Prize, is called KIT1. It is a mix of IoT, DIY and open sourcing that analyzes the environment we live in. The data can be centralized and used to improve air quality or to avoid areas with high radiation. Motisan’s design has gone through multiple iterations before reaching a version that could be built with off-the-shelf components and it has a more compact design that allows for an extra battery for increased autonomy. The default board has a slot for the Geiger tube, a connector for ethernet and another for an LCD screen from a Nokia 5110 phone. A speaker mounted on the board provides audio alerts when an abnormal degree of radiation is detected.

With display, batteries and sensors, KIT1 can be taken anywhere and will show the sensor output on the LCD. If the device is used as a static monitoring station, the ethernet connection is required to send the data to a backend server of your choice. Motisan also set up a public server to collect measurements from all over the world, both from KIT1 and other products of his, but made professionally with crowdfunding support.

The circuit design and the firmware for KIT1 are available for anyone who wants to build their own dosimeter. Released under the GPL license, the code can be altered in any way to better suit their needs.

Image credit: Radu Motisan