Raspberry Pi – a Platform for Rapid Development of Radiation Monitoring Device

Raspberry Pi is a powerful and inexpensive embedded computing platform. It is powerful enough to run a full Linux operating system, and has digital input/output ports. Using this platform make the development easy and fast for running graphical user interface and serve as IoT end point that is connected to radiation monitoring detectors.

Raspberry Pi allows the development of different portable applications for radiation monitoring with high flexibility to modifications of the hardware configuration, the detectors in-use and the software requirements according to any facility needs. The Raspberry Pi platform is all-inclusive from the hardware aspect (display, connectors, communication, power supply and many more) as it can be expanded using various modules that are constantly developed by a growing community of users.

There are two possible variations to deploy the Raspberry Pi in a radiation monitoring device. The first is using it for real-time monitoring with a dedicated graphical screen (optional touch screen) connected to various detectors with digital output. Graphical user interface can be developed very fast to display real time data received from the detector as well as different configuration parameters of the detector, like thresholds and calibration factors. The other option is using the Raspberry Pi as a pipeline to retrieve and transfer the data to or from the connected detector enabling them to communicate with remote devices in the intranet or internet world.

Raspberry Pi supports wired and wireless communication capabilities. The wired includes connecting the detectors via serial or Ethernet ports to the embedded system. Wireless connections include Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, that are supported by on-platform hardware or any other wireless connection (RFID, RF, GSM) that can be added as an expansion add-on module. Via services like e-mail, SMS and etc. it is possible to send the data to remote users. The use of the wireless capabilities is the one that makes the Raspberry Pi as a recognizable IoT device.

The almost endless flexibility that provide embedded systems like the Raspberry Pi allow us to propose fast solutions and to develop applications for daily use of clients making it an effective development tool.