Measuring Radon

[sparkman]

Hi all,

I'm looking for a way to measure radon levels and send the data to HS. Has anyone done something like this? If so, please share details. I've searched online and there don't appear to be a lot of choices for radon detectors. The most common one seems to be the Pro Series 3 Electronic Radon Gas Detector, but there's no easy way to get data out. I did find the following hack: http://www.howmuchsnow.com/arduino/radon/ and the other option I'm considering is using a webcam to create pictures of the display and then using OCR software such as Tesseract OCR to analyze the image and get the value that way. Thoughts?

Cheers
Al

[jlikonen]

+1. I would also been interested in this.

[Rupp]

Check this out:
http://voksenlia.net/met/radon/radon_e.php

[sparkman]

Check this out:
http://voksenlia.net/met/radon/radon_e.php

Great, thanks. Had not found that one yet. The sensors he uses come from here: http://www.aw-el.com/ and it looks like there are other ways to get the data from those sensors besides 1-wire.

Cheers
Al

[mrhappy]

Just a word on Tesseract, years ago I tried reading a meter with a camera image and had reasonable accuracy (probably about 80-90%) but I have a project on at the minute which uses a web camera to read my water meter and Tesseract simply cannot read the display correctly (out of seven digits I will be lucky if I get one right). Even inverting the image, turning it monochrome and other tricks have not really helped.

I would stick to a wired solution and I am back to the drawing board with my water meter project, I'm resorting to a manual input for the data.

[sparkman]

Thanks for the heads up Adam, I won't need to waste time on that. I did find a couple of other sites that deal with recognizing numbers from 7 segment displays:

http://www.diga.me.uk/sevenSegDecode.html
http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~auerswal/ssocr/

Cheers
Al