An educational distributed Cosmic Ray detector network based on ArduSiPM

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed network of low-cost, microcontroller-based cosmic ray detectors utilizing internet infrastructure for precise timing, enabling large-scale citizen science projects to monitor high-energy cosmic rays and radiation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, scalable, and accessible cosmic ray detection network leveraging microcontrollers and internet-based synchronization for distributed citizen science.

Findings

Distributed detectors can synchronize timing within a few milliseconds.

The network enables large-scale monitoring of cosmic rays across wide geographic areas.

Low-cost detectors are feasible for widespread citizen science participation.

Abstract

The advent of microcontrollers with enough CPU power and with analog and digital peripherals makes possible to design a complete particle detector with relative acquisition system around one microcontroller chip. The existence of a world wide data infrastructure as internet allows for devising a distributed network of cheap detectors capable to elaborate and send data or respond to settings commands. The internet infrastructure enables to distribute the absolute time (with precision of few milliseconds), to the simple devices far apart, with few milliseconds precision, from a few meters to thousands of kilometres. So it is possible to create a crowdsourcing experiment of citizen science that use small scintillation-based particle detectors to monitor the high energetic cosmic ray and the radiation environment.