A simple Docker container to measure and record background radiation in your area. Radiation is detected with a cheaply available board, and connected to a Raspberry Pi to provide Prometheus for datalogging and Grafana for pretty charts.

You can find live example deployments of this setup here:

• Geiger Counter - Belmont, MA, USA
• Geiger Counter - Heerlen, Netherlands

• A Raspberry Pi 3B+ or later (4 or 5 will definitely work, but are a bit of overkill)
• A 32 GB (or larger) SD card (we recommend SanDisk Extreme Pro SD cards)
• A power supply (PSU)
• A radiation detector Amazon UK or AliExpress
• Some Dupont cables/jumper jerky (you’ll need 3 female-female cables - NOTE - check, they often come included with your radiation detector kit!)

There are 3 connections we need to make from the radiation detector board to the Raspberry Pi. They are +5V and Ground (GND) for power, and the output pulse line to detect the count. Note that this is called Vin which can be a bit confusing as this usually means ‘voltage input’ or something similar, but on this board, it’s the output.

In this configuration you only need to provide 5 volt power to one of the two boards; if you’re powering the Pi with a standard micro-USB power supply, that will power the detector board via the connections we’ve just made, as well.

1. Get a Raspberry Pi and load a SD card image with Raspberry Pi OS or DietPi
2. Add this to end of /boot/config.txt to enable the GPIO headers:

dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
dtparam=i2c_arm=on
dtparam=spi=on
dtparam=audio=on
enable_uart=0
gpu_mem=16

3. Install Docker using the script from this page
4. Reboot your system and log in again
5. Enter the following commands:

sudo mkdir -p -m 777 /opt/geiger
cd /opt/geiger
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kx1t/background-radiation-monitor/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d 

Notes

• you should tell the software on which GPIO pin you are feeding the Geiger pulses by adding the environment parameter below
• the pin number corresponds to the number on the circuit board. In our case, we connected Vin of the CAJOE Geiger board to pin 33 of the Pi's GPIO connector
• you should also connect the ground of the CAJOE Geiger board to any of the GPIO ground pins
• Optionally, you can feed 5 Volts from your Raspberry Pi to the 5 Volts pin on the CAJOE Geiger board

- GEIGER_PIN=33

Now you have a dashboard that can talk to an existing instance of Prometheus. Check that it works with:

docker logs -f geiger

You can put following in your prometheus.yml config file to ingest data. If you don't run Prometheus in the same docker-compose stack as your geiger container, replace geiger with the IP of the machine on which your Geiger Counter is running:

Type cat | sude tee /opt/geiger/prometheus/config/prometheus.yml >/dev/null and paste in the following:

# my global config
global:
  scrape_interval: 15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
  evaluation_interval: 15s # Evaluate rules every 15 seconds. The default is every 1 minute.
  # scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

# Alertmanager configuration
alerting:
  alertmanagers:
    - static_configs:
        - targets:

scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: "prometheus"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9090"]
  - job_name: 'geiger'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['geiger:9274']

If you want a sample Grafana dashboard, you can start with this one: 20075