Building The CERN / NBI Geiger Counter Kit (Teach Your Kids Electronics)

We are building an ESP8266 based Geiger counter that I was given by the crew at Science Pavillion, at Roskilde Festival 2022. Science Pavillon is a initiative between CERN and Niels Bohr Institute, with a joint effort to teach science to the young people attending the Roskilde Festival. I was hired in to do Tesla coil shows, mounted on top of their tent, for 3 days in the warmup of the festival. That is also why this post and video is marked as sponsored content, I was hired in for the job, but got this leftover kit for free.

I built the project together with my kids, but a Geiger counter is a pretty abstract project. The end goal of something making beep sounds to invisible things, is just not the right project for kids to relate to 🙂

Geiger counter parts

The controller in the Geiger counter is an ESP8266 D1 mini, which features WIFI. The display is a 0.91 inch OLED I2C Display 128 x 32 pixels. The buzzer module is marked MH-MFG “buzzer module high level trigger”. The high voltage power supply is marked “Havanatec XIPA HIA4V1.8”. The Geiger-Müller tube is a SBM-20.

The source code for the proect is unknown, but it is custom made since the Science Pavilion text at startup is shown. But I am guessing that if you search for open source projects with Geiger counter and ESP8266 with OLED display, something very similar must exist.

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