“Ionization chamber is a device to measure radioactivity level. When air’s atoms are hit by radioactive particles, an ion-pair is produced. Ions has electric charge, if they are in electric field create by positive and negative electrodes, negative ions will move to positive electrode and positive will move to negative electrode. They will try to “meet each other” thus creating a current. This current can be measured. The current is proportional to amount of ion-pairs. Amount of ion-pairs is proportional to radioactivity level.
Architecture of the device is presented below. It’s made of analog part + STM8 microcontroller that collects and sends measurements via UART. Those measurements are collected on Raspberry side and processed using Python and R scripts. results are stored in .cvs (raw data) or .png (diagrams). It would be possible to simplify this setup and avoid Raspberry, but I wanted to made it possible to gather data and flash the chip without being physically around the device.”