Your Android Phone Can Do Double Duty As a Geiger Counter

by Jason Fitzpatrick on January 16th, 2012

Android: While we’d hope you’d never need it, clever researchers have figured out how to turn the camera on your Android phone into a makeshift Geiger Counter with nothing more than an app and some black tape.

It’s not as versatile as a true Geiger Counter (it doesn’t measure as broad a spectrum) but for a free application that could be quickly deployed during an emergency to the hundreds of millions of smartphones floating around, it’s pretty awesome. From the app author’s web site:

This App is not one of those numerous “fun apps”, but a true, really working radiation detector. We already did measurements for certain devices using professional equipment at the Helmholtz Research Center Munich, the scale we used for testing starts at several 2-10 µGy/h up to 10 Gy/h (about 10Sv/h) with the latest measurements

Want to play around with it? Hit up the link below to grab a free copy. [Ed. Oops! The app is actually $4.99 for the full version and $1.49 for the lite version.]

Radiactivity Counter [via Hack A Day]

Jason Fitzpatrick is a warranty-voiding DIYer who spends his days cracking opening cases and wrestling with code so you don't have to. If it can be modded, optimized, repurposed, or torn apart for fun he's interested (and probably already at the workbench taking it apart). You can follow him on if you'd like.