Hackathons can sometimes turn into a sea of laptops and monitors, so perhaps it's no surprise that as I wandered the Disrupt Europe Hackathon today, I found myself drawn to a table covered with wiring and gadgets, including a Geiger counter.
The idea was pretty unusual, too - as the four-person team explained it to me, they're trying to build a system for collecting and displaying crowdsourced radiation data.
Philip Wagner (the team member actually working with the Geiger counter) explained that in situations like the Fukushima nuclear disaster, you might not trust the company involved to give you accurate warnings about the radiation danger. So a participant in the Open Radioactivity Warning System would receive their own Geiger counter which collects and shares live data online.
The team's hardware attracted other passersby, and one of them suggested that a similar project already exists. I think they were talking about Safecast, a project that was originally funded through Kickstarter in the wake of Fukushima - right now, it looks like Safecast is focused on Japan.
The team comes from the Austrian cities of Linz and Vienna, and it's their first time at Disrupt. Wagner attributed the idea to his teammate Alex Entinger, who seems to have brought the the group together - he went to school with one of his teammates, another is his girlfriend, and he said he recruited Wagner because they work on the same floor.
It seems like the system is still very much a work in progress, but Entinger said he's determined to have something finished for the hackathon presentations tomorrow. In the meantime, you can see an initial version on the website of Entinger's startup, LXRobotics.
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