Open source Geiger counter successfully kickstarted

The Safecast project, which was co-founded by BoingBoing contributor Sean Bonner in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, has recently completed a successful Kickstarter funding round to create an open source Geiger counter. Safecast aims to supply residents of Japan with reliable, crowd-sourced radiation measurements.

The Kickstarter campaign for the Safecast X Geiger counter has raised $104,268 in a very short time, far exceeding its original $4,000 goal. The device was designed by former Xbox hacker and Chumby co-founder Andrew “Bunnie” Huang and all files for the reference design are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence with a patent cross-licensing provisionPDF. Initial source code for the device's software can also be downloaded and more code will be made available on GitHub as it is written.