Hi all,

in the last project log I was talking about how there will soon be fully manufactured detector boards. I'm glad to tell you this moment will come within some time in the next week. When everything's ready I'll create another post here and link to the webshop.

I have partnered up with makerfabs who have already collaborated with many other project owners here on Hackaday. They will take care of everything from the manufacturing of the PCBs, to assembly and selling on their webshop. For anyone curious, the price will be USD 55 which is justified for this kind of entry-level device to gamma spectroscopy. In addition to the board you will only need a scintillator and SiPM and you're completely read to go! (maybe also grab a micro-USB cable, I don't know lol)

Until then, here are some photos of the new boards. Down below I will also shortly go into all the recent changes to the electronics and the software as there was a tiny revision (now 2.0b) change.

Here are the promised changelog and other findings:

• R3 is now a 1k value resistor. This fixes an admittedly ancient issue that would create noise at the lower voltages; now you should be able to set your threshold even lower without much interference.
• The inductor used in the SiPM power supply was rotated by 180 degrees for EMI reasons.
• Power draw is actually more like 15 mA @ 5V with normal background radiation instead of the 25 mA I measured earlier.
• I added the voltage reference to the BOM, because although it's optional, it's very cheap (only about $1) and also decreases the Vref noise significantly. So you can't really do anything wrong with adding the reference to the board.
• The cps limit in geiger mode measured more like 110,000 instead of the 100,000 cps from before. Not a big improvement, but that's what it is. This was clocked in with the Arduino software and averaging disabled, so you don't need to make any significant changes to the code at all to get to this level.
• Removed the unused Arduino-Pico-Analog-Correction library for now. Might come back.
• The sample and hold circuit for the energy measurements will be periodically reset now by default. This is used to counter any interference from your mains or other sources that would otherwise drown the detector in noise after a while. You can disable this setting if you put the device in a metal can or shield it otherwhise. More on this on Github: https://github.com/Open-Gamma-Project/Open-Gamma-Detector#shielding

That's it for now, we will hear each other when the webshop is ready! Have a nice day.