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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

I would really like to have a geiger counter that I can put on the wall and connect to Zigbee/Z-Wave/WiFi and tie into Home Assistant. I've considered building one with the cheaper tube and ESP32, but I'm surprised that for Radon and radiation, it seems like something like AirGradient, but for radioactivity, doesn't exist.

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You might be interested in RadiaCode (full gamma spectrum) and RadiaCode Python Library - https://www.radiacode.com/ and https://github.com/cdump/radiacode

For Radon detection options are

* direct alpha detection via wet film + process (slow, and day turnover physical processing) OR optical scintillation of filtered air, or

* stochastic gamma detection via a full spectrum and a formula to identify and divide out main peaks and daughter peaks of overlapping common radiometric decay (Uranium, Potassium, Thorium) to guesstimate the radon

I did this with radiacode and that library. I had chatgpt put together a quick little server that pushes from cdump/radiacode into MQTT for home assistant. I'd be happy to release it if there's interest.

I am not aware of anything that can connect to home assistant like that. It is definitely missing from the market and something I would like to make eventually, but too many other projects to finish first.

I use an Aranet radiation sensor[0] that ties in nicely with home assistant. It was more of a fun purchase, and excuse my lack of radiation knowledge, but is it same as those geiger counters or something a big different, I assumed it's similar but slower? They also have other sensors for Radon, CO2, etc

[0] https://aranet.com/en/home/products/aranet-radiation-sensor

Oh I didn't realize that worked with home assistant. It's a little different than a Geiger tube, that device uses a PIN diode and reacts to radiation interactions with the diode itself. Accuracy isn't great for dose but probably decent enough. Sensitivity is very very low, takes a while to get a reading. In theory it should be able to handle high dose rate levels but the spec sheet says it only measures to 1 mSv/hr which is pretty low, I don't know why. Their radon sensor is a different sensor tech, and CO2 and such is standard stuff pretty easy to implement.

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