I was wondering how you would detect radiation with brass and wood, but it turns out this was actually talking about how to build a snazzy enclosure and not at all about how to detect radiation : /
Wood is a thermal insulator, so with care, one might be able to build a thermistor bridge capable of detecting the differential temperature rise between pieces of brass when a source was placed near one brass-piece.
I, too, found that the expectations framed by the title were not met by the article. It's a pretty box, though.
Yeah, I feel like listing out the "raspberry pi, brass and wood" created the expectation that those were the crucial elements. Really the crucial element is a pre-made geiger counter and what they built is a beautiful enclosure and display. It's a cool project and they didn't lie, but it was misleading, and it seems it was the author of the piece who posted it so the confusion is reasonable to call out.
This got me thinking: how far down the current human tech tree could a single person get on their own? It took thousands of years for humans to go from fire to the steam locomotive; could someone do it in a lifetime?
Obviously the ability to skip by basic research and dead ends would cut this down by a ton, but ultimately a lot of the things we’ve created in the past century requires a huge amount of complicated machinery to make, which requires more machines and more labor. Could a person reasonably start from scratch (let’s say skip the mining and just give them coal & metal ores) and make a Geiger tube? Or would it be too difficult?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolometer
Wood is a thermal insulator, so with care, one might be able to build a thermistor bridge capable of detecting the differential temperature rise between pieces of brass when a source was placed near one brass-piece.
I, too, found that the expectations framed by the title were not met by the article. It's a pretty box, though.