Solid state radiation detector with X-100-7

[Emanuele C.]

Dear all,
I would like to intoduce my recent experiment with X-100-7 & Arduino.
The system employs the X-100-7manufactured by First Sensor and assembled on breakout board from Radiation Watch, an Arduino Atmega 328, an OLED display and a LiPo battery.
I've started with a library called RadiationWatch that is supposed to be specifically designed for the breakout board but I'm not satisfied.
Therefore I started to work on the code in order to find the better strategy to average the pulses coming from the sensor.
At the moment I'm still experimenting but I will post some pictures about the current status.

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Regards to all,
Emanuele

[Steven Sesselmann]

Nice work.. Do you have a schematic for the x-100-7 bias and preamp?

I messed around with these, but did not succeed in getting a reliable pulse, all I seemed to get was noise.

[Emanuele C.]

Dear Steven,
actually I'm using the breakout board from Radiation Watch and I haven't tryed to play just with the PIN diode yet (see the following scheme for your convenience).

5c.pdf

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Furthermore another aspect to consider is that the PIN diode is very sensitive to mechanical vibrations and shocks.
Due to this, the breakout board from Radiation Watch has two outputs: one is for the signal catched by the PIN diode (that includes noise from mechanical vibrations), while the other one is just for pulses due to mechanical vibrations.
Therefore in order to discriminate the pulses due to photons hitting the PIN diode, is necessary to subtract the counts from noise output to the counts from signal output.

Hope this can help.