Together with Joe Moross we manned a booth where we showcased the latest bGeigie+, Safecast interactive map, Rad-stickers (TM), and our SAM940 defender. We had cool Safecast T-shirts for sale and had quite some interest. Noda-san, Safecast volunteer in Chiba, dropped by to get her bGeigie serviced. The event was attended by over 400 people and many came to drop by at our booth. Some of our volunteers were under the attendees and it was great to catch up.

Today’s goal is to measure a hotspot we recently found on our map in Minami Soma, take soil samples, cover a few roads not covered yet, and meet with volunteers in Koriyama in the evening. So far we have had heavy traffic due to rain and Golden Week holiday rush, and we hope to achieve as much as possible. Total distance 500km back and forth.

On board we have a lot of measurement equipment – 8 bGeigies, 14 various geiger counters and 1 spectrometer (SAM940 3″). We also have tools for taking soil samples.

Two of the bGeigies are for volunteers in Aizu and Koriyama. One of the volunteers is the Fukushima Kodomo no Momorokai volunteer group (Fukushima Save the Kids group), which is another grass roots volunteer group nation wide that has done much to educate and measure radiation in local communities. The 2 bGeigies are the now legendary bGeigie Mini’s with Ninja’s for remote monitoring. Most of the 3,000,000 measurement have been done with the Mini’s. Accidentally, today is also the exact birthdate of the bGeigie Mini system, which was built after the first 3 bGeigies, that were using a PC to control the sensors outside the car. The Mini eliminated the PC by using a Freakduino and special shield and made the bGeigie ready for crowd use.

Another 5 bGeigies are for Minami Soma city where we have received request from their city . These are the new bGeigie+, which have rechargeable battery and have a USB interface for charging and easy file reading.

For the bGeigie+ we developed a new Arduino shield that supports the new functionality. Together with Sugimura-san, Robin and Joe we have been busy working on many improvements to the bGeigie+ over the past months to improve reliability and manufactureablity. In our stress tests this week we were able to get between 10-11 hour non-stop operation on a fully charged system without any disruption in measurement (location, radiation, time). Tests included mounting the bGeigies on our bicycles to see how the system performs under extreme vibration and impact. To ensure we are able to recover from occasional system hangs, Akiba helped us to enable a function that will restart the system in case it stops responding. We hope with the deployment of the 5 bGeigie+ in Minami Soma we will see if the improvements have been effective and identify further opportunities for improvement. And of course the bGeigie+ come with Ninja wireless monitors and rugged Pelican cases.

Another area we have made much progress is to provide better tools for quickly viewing and analyzing raw measurement logs. Lionel and Rob made a utility that allows a drive log file to be emailed and returns a map in PDF format with drive analysis. It also supports output in KML format and reports can be generated in Japanese or English. As it runs through email, it ensures that it can be used in environments where public access to internet is limited or custom software can;t be easily installed (e.g. corporate networks that are behind a firewall)

“Never leave home without a geiger” mom used to say

Today we have a good variety of geiger counters and scintilators. Of course many are the Medcom Inspector, the work horse for most measurements we do at Safecast. We use them exclusively in our bGeigies and for surface measurements. We also have a scintilator from Thermo, that allows for fast gamma measurement and hot spot identification. The yellow device is a Thermo B20 surface contamination and gamma dose rate geiger counter. The other is a Mazur Instruments PRM-8000 with a LND712 geiger tube and recording capabilities that Kalin brought along. It’s similar to the german Gamma scout. It’s not a looker but is a well engineered device.

The blue device on the right is the Ninja – it shows the radiation level the bGeigie is measuring outside the car. It can show multiple bGeigies output, and provides visual and audio signals in case of loss of GPS signal, high radiation levels, and device failure. Robin did a great job recently rewriting the interface and the Ninja is a whole lot more intuitive in use!

We just finished measuring the areas in Ibaraki we had not covered yet and are now en route to Minami Soma.

To be continued …

“Decontamination and Food Safety:  Is Enough Being Done?”

Date : Thursday 12 April

Time: 18:30-20:00 (Doors open at 18:00)
Location:  K.I.T Toranomon Graduate School
Atago Toyo Bldg.
Room 101 (ground floor)
1-3-4 Atago, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105-0002

Access:
http://www.kanazawa-it.ac.jp/tokyo/map.htm
http://www.kanazawa-it.ac.jp/tokyo/english/index.html

8 mins from Ginza Line, Toranomon Stn
8 mins from Hibiya Line, Kamiyacho Stn
8 mins from Toei Mita Line, Onarimon Stn

The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

Outline of discussion:

As a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, decontamination of affected areas as well as food safety are now of great concern in Japan.  On April 12, 2012 from 18:30–20:00, a panel of experts and informed citizens from social media, science, and the community will come together to discuss these issues and answer questions. The event will be in English.

Panelists:
Pieter Franken – Co-Founder/Japan Director, Safecast.org (Facebook)
David Sidney Moore – Founder/Administrator, Tokyo Kids & Radiation (Facebook)
David Wagner – Founder/Administrator, Japan Food Safety (Facebook)
Frank Sanns – Regular Contributor, Tokyo Radiation Levels (Facebook)

Moderator: Azby Brown, Director, KIT Future Design Institute

In addition to these panelists, technical experts from Safecast and others are expected to attend and to be available to share their insights.

This event will be ON-the-record.

(Please note that this event is not being organized by KIT, and they will not be able to answer inquiries.  Please contact azbybrown(at) me.com)

Safecast Survey Meter – Technology and Funds from Outside Sources

“This is our new survey meter”, said Dan Sythe, President of International Medcom in California, presenting a palm-size prototype of a new survey meter. On March 25, 2012 core members of Safecast, an international volunteer group, gathered in Shibuya, Tokyo to celebrate their group’s one year anniversary.

The survey meter measures alpha, beta, gamma rays and can be easily connected to the internet via USB. It has a characteristic design with no sharp edges. The price will be around 50,000 yen and part of each sale will be donated to Safecast.

It will be sold on the Amazon internet site from sometime this summer, and it may make more of the general public participate in radiation measurements to facilitate large scale measurement of the radiation that was dispersed in various places after the nuclear power accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi in March 2011.

Dan Sythe got involved in Safecast through his friend. Several Safecast members got involved in the same way. Safecast started from the online communication of only three individuals. Right after the nuclear power accident Pieter Franken, CTO of Monex Securities Co., Joichi Ito, known for his extensive activities in foreign countries, currently Director of MIT Media Lab, and Sean Bonner, a Los Angeles based entrepreneur, exchanged e-mails and tweets: “What has happened?” “Did you make sure your family is safe?” Their conversation shifted to the subject of radiation and that survey meters to measure radiation were scarce and hard to get hold of. They agreed that they have got to make one by themselves.

They were not experts in survey meters so they asked others with know-how in this field. Soon their circle of friends extended to Dan Sythe, Ray Ozzie, ex Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, Jun Murai, Professor of Keio University in charge of Sensor Networks.

They discussed the outline of their project online and the members gathered one month later. Fundraising was also done via the internet at fundraising site “Kickstarter”. They started with ideas and obtained technology and funds from outside sources. This is ultimate form of open innovation.

An interesting coincidence happened: Last summer Tadao Munakata, a member of an NPO organization, was stranded along a road for two hours due to car trouble. Franken happened to drive by, and that’s how their affiliation started. Franken says they were using different radiation measurement methods, however from now on he wants to make it possible to integrate the data collected by either system.

Safecast has reached out to businesses for cooperation beyond the circle of friends and volunteers. For example, they have asked retail stores and a taxi company to mount their survey meter for the purpose of building a structure to easily measure how the radiation levels changes over time. They have completed a system for comprehensive continuous measurement of radiation levels, and they are able to go anywhere if another nuclear power accident occur. However, they realised that the lack of radiation measurement data from before March 11, 2011 makes it difficult to compare the radiation levels before and after March 11, and therefore they have started measuring radiation levels in other countries.

There are other environmental issues than radiation, like for example air and water pollution. Franken says it is possible to measure the level of pollution by applying the same approach as that of Safecast by involving citizen scientists.

Beginning this year we’ll begin to monitor air quality as well as radiation. Safecast volunteer Ariel Levi Simons will be heading up this wing of the project – he’s based in Los Angeles where he’s a science teacher at The Wildwood School and where air quality is a constant topic, yet most people know very little about what the actual content of the air they breath is. This is the very early stages, but if you’d like to join these discussions we’ve created a Safecast Air Monitoring Project Mailing & Discussion list where we’ll begin to put these pieces together.

On Sunday March 25th at Loftwork’s newly opened FabCafe in Shibuya we’ll have a bit longer to talk about what we’ve been up to for the last year. From 1100 – 1300 we’ll give a Safecast Presentation that is open to the public, press invited. We will show off selected photos and data from the first year of Safecast, as well as brand new data visualizations recently built by Tony DeVincenzi and his team at MIT Media Lab, and a prototype of the new geiger counter we’ve designed that will be in production soon. Following that from 1300 to 1500 we’ll host an open session for anything, Q&A, Demos, etc.

Hope you can make it!