I mentioned it earlier in another thread so here it is:
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I was improvising the speech for the video so it is pretty stuttering, I may have to voice it over some day... This would also take care of the washing machine sound from downstairs :).
There is no link to the product page yet from the root of the website, I'll put one after sleeping on it once or twice I suppose.
My greatest pride is not the electronics part, it was significantly more trivial to make than that for HPGe spectrometry, but the mechanics. All done in the new mechanical workshop - apart from the gear wheels, the large brass one was off the shelf and got modified for the purpose (basically cutting its teeth would have been a bit too much for the workshop as it is now).
Thermoluminescent dosimeters, a kind of radiation badge, X-ray workers, and nucleide users, send 'em periodically to the safety office to be read. The pellet goes into an oven, and when baked, it gives off a light pulse proportional to the 'charge' it got from irradiation.
Customers would be... the radiation safety officers.
Looks like the reader gives lots of info, but not in report format (on the shown screens). I see lots of setup info on the thermal cycle.
Ideally, the reader should recognize badges by (barcoded) serial numbers, as well as doing a redout cycle, but this is apparently also a multichannel analyzer (something fancier than the ones I've dealt with).
The report comes as text - the almost covered white window - but it is what I made up as the customer for the first two units was not at all specific about it. They may yet come with some demands. Here is an entry:
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Sample_name: Sample # 2 digital Measured_on: Wed, 4 Sep 2019 17:32:56 +0300 Acquisition_time: 8.1919184 s Dwell_time: 1e-3 s Preheated_at: 150 C Heated_at: 259 C Gross_total: 88.108e3 units 0.176216 ROI 1 (247 to 7832): Gross= 87.955e3 units Dose_gross= 0.17591 Dose_net= 0.183496
Sample_name: Sample # 2 analog Measured_on: Wed, 4 Sep 2019 17:32:56 +0300 Acquisition_time: 8.1919184 s Dwell_time: 1e-3 s Preheated_at: 150 C Heated_at: 259 C Gross_total: 179.528e3 units 35.905599 ROI 1 (272 to 7573): Gross= 166.529e3 units Dose_gross= 33.305799 Dose_net= 9.9393997
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Not necessarily sane, I picked at random an entry archived while I have been toying with the device. Just the raw data (called units) is valid, there has been no calibration. (Calibration is done the way it is done for say gamma spectra, only it is Y axis rather than X axis relevant; basically it is up to the user to calibrate as detectors can be very different, not sourced by us etc.).
Obviously if a customer wants a different format we'd easily do it, all the info is archived, it is only a matter of what to take from it and how to present it.
We may get to that. The customer who bought the first two units is very close to ordering such an upgrade - which would be minimal technically and a lot saner than what they have been chasing for years now with no luck - reading digits rather than barcode. Probably next few months they will come for that as well but if they don't I am not going to push it just for the sake of a demo.
It was just the easiest way for me to do it, the MCA you can see underneath is a mature product so doing the TLD thing took a really minor development effort, we could hide its cost within the entire unit cost (buying any other one from elsewhere would have been costlier to them and would likely not have had the dynamic range our device gave them).
Yeah, an ugly OCR font would be preferred if a digit-reader were to be used. As I understand safety-test-document sensitivities, an operator signoff and maybe some dosimeter batch and/or manufacture info would be sale-able features.
If we are to do it we will use barcode (those new square things perhaps), reading digits is insane. The only reason they wanted to go this way was because digits are human readable, and years ago when they conceived the idea not everyone had a smartphone with them to read a barcode.
The barcode system I have in mind will take care of the dosimeter batch. Not so sure I get it about the 'operator signoff', is it something the TLD reader operator would manually write at the end of the report? I don't know if I don't understand the meaning because of my English or because of my lack of respective background....
On a sunny day (Sat, 7 Sep 2019 20:47:43 +0300) it happened Dimiter_Popoff wrote in :
For use as 'radiation badge' these work for me:
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comes with several pens people can wear:
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Its just a charged vane you can read through a windon in each pen charged by this unit:
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circuit diagram:
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when your reactor goes critical, your hexafluoride flows, and you are enriching to 60% then the vane discharges, and you can see how much your were exposed too...
I payed the stunning amount of lemme see Total pendosis meetset pendosisset
1 Excl. BTW: ? 6,20 Incl. BTW: ? 7,50 in the army dump.
Whats the dollar these days? anyways less than 7 USD.
I see it is at 100% discharged, OK lemme check the plutoni...
For audit purposes, it's usual for a safety/health check to be associated with an individual tester (who is known trained for the testing procedure), and a personal mark goes onto a filed report. Return address on an e-mail might suffice, though. You just want to know that the operator was serious and diligent.
Thanks, I get it now. This will be easy to add, and brings to mind that I can also add some more, like unit serial number and some more of the settings used with the measurement.
I have seen, also, 'date of last calibration' of the test device on the reports; even a lockout that (at one year) makes it difficult to perform a test pending a new calibration.
Date of last calibration, may be I have seen that, too. Makes sense though with TLD the main source of calibration errors should be the dosimeter chips (pills? tablets? don't know the lingo), contamination etc. But reader calibration is cheap and easy and then putting that in the report adds credibility/saleability so I may put that as well.
A lockout is somewhat against my gut feeling. I'd do one to sell a unit of course but only if someone asks for it.
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