Hackers’ DIY Projects Assist Japanese Recovery

With altogether the problems Japan is lining, the geeks of Tokyo Hackerspace are finding nobelium shortage of work. Tokio Hackerspace, and other hackerspaces like it, are places where hackers and technical school enthusiasts can cause together and fiddle with hardware.

Akiba shows off some of the DIY monitoring equipment. — Kalin from Tokyo Hackerspace shows off the gamma spectrometer and geiger counter.

After high month's earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese group decided to use its expertise to help with relief efforts.The group currently has cardinal different alleviation projects going connected, including, according to one member, "running an evacuee shelter in Kamogawa, providing hygiene packs for masses at shelters, construction out solar lanterns for areas that still have atomic number 102 tycoo, [and] getting star phone chargers out to the calamity region."

Peradventure the nearly celebrated of these efforts, however, is a meted out web of radiation monitors around the Fukushima atomic plant, which failed concisely aft the disaster. These do-it-yourself monitors help to keep people apprised of the levels of actinotherapy from the burst plant. Once the project got going, Tokyo Hackerspace worked to boom the sensor network with Safecast (formerly RDTN) and Geiger Maps JP, two sites that sum and visualize irradiatio data.

The Ask for Information

It's easy to imagine that people in Japan have access to far more information about radiation in Fukushima than we set, but that isn't the case. Many of the people who need it the to the highest degree know far less.

"The idea essentially came from impression helpless," says Akiba, a hacker with Tokyo Hackerspace World Health Organization helped spearhead the stick out.

Akiba, whose forename is Chris, takes his hacker public figure from his wife's surname and the slang for Japanese capital's technical school-happy Akihabara district. Although Akiba, who lives in Tokyo, was relatively unharmed past the quake itself, atomic number 2 started to see a act of a panic in the urban center after the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant began. "Unfortunately, there was not much word on what the safety implications were at the time, and many people got paranoid. That's when you started seeing hoi polloi flee Tokio."

The project began as a way to collect and dish out more-recent radiation information than the government was releasing, in an effort to keep Tokyo residents calm. On March 13, just a day after the explosions at Fukushima, Tokyo Hackerspace was working on getting its personal radiation information. The government took almost a calendar week to begin releasing exoteric radiation data, and flatbottomed then the data was infrequent.

Hacking Together Radiation Data

The early challenge was obtaining monitoring equipment. In the first few days after the quake, nary Geiger counters were on tap for buy up in the Capital of Japa area. What's worse, according to Akiba the Geiger counters that were providing data weren't much help. "There were very few information points from Hans Geiger counters in Tokyo at the time, and nigh were located indoors," he says. Walls and evening windows block a good deal of close radiation, so interior readings were much glower than outdoor readings.

So Akiba put up outer the call for Geiger counters through Tokyo Hackerspace–and before long got a response. Like many hackerspace projects, this cause has received assistance from other hackers around the world. The first Geiger counters used in the project were from the Reuseum, an ID business that recycles old technology to new homes. Tokyo Hackerspace gladly ordered the counters, and–afterward devising few calls to puzzle out WHO was still flying packages into Tokyo–the group had the monitoring equipment quickly shipped in.

Tokyo Hackerspace members work on their sensors. — Tokyo Hackerspace members work connected their sensors.

Once the Geiger counters were composed, Akiba–with the help of Tokyo Hackerspace–started work on the complex process of converting a Cold War-era Geiger-Muller counter to fertilize radiation data onto the Internet, a process that he chronicled along his blog. The procedure involved determination a way to convert the analog Geiger counter to give off a digital signal and then determinative how to send that signal out to be divided up on the Web.

The Project's Current Status

Since that eldest hack started broadcasting radiation data a couple of weeks agone, Tokyo Hackerspace has developed some much more sophisticated tools and begun working with various partners to beat radiation data to the public. Rather than using familiar equipment and an specific come nea for from each one and all sensor, Tokyo Hackerspace has matured a simpler Geiger heel counter kit exploitation the ASCII text file Arduino platform (an unchaste-to-curriculum microprocessor that's a DIY community favored) on with a Geiger docking device for the iPhone.

The hackerspace's prototype iPhone 'Geiger dock'.

Tokyo Hackerspace's goal is to expand the sensing element network out from Tokyo into the Fukushima region. Very much like in Tokyo, many of the shelters in the Fukushima area lack monitoring equipment–and the absence of information is leading many people in the shelters to worry that they're being exposed to grave amounts of radiation sickness. Akiba, Tokio Hackerspace, and their partners are hoping to help reassure the exoteric.

Erst the initial data is collected around Fukushima, Tokyo Hackerspace is looking to switch over to a new chore. According to MRE, another member of Tokio Hackerspace, "the historical finish is looking at at long-term exposure [over months and years], too as radiation 'migration patterns' over fourth dimension." It seems likely that, as in Yeddo, the irradiatio levels in the shelters around Fukushima leave be safe. "However," says MRE, "the cumulative exposure, while made in small doses, can buoy come. So tracking levels over the next six months to a year volition glucinium authoritative."

If you'd like to pitch in, view contributing to the RDTN kickstarter for a actinotherapy sensor net to help the project expand. For other options, interpret our maneuver to conducive to relief efforts without getting scammed.