Digital Designs and Scientific Hardware - Open-Source Lab: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs - page 214

FIGURE 6.57 Screenshot of Japan Geigermap: at-a-glance as of the writing of this topic.
This kind of activity may be the start of a movement to bring more people into science and
act as a check on bad or dishonest sources of scientific information for the public [ 32 ] . Con-
ceptually, this type of crowd sourcing of scientific data is considered as part of the “Particip-
atory Sensing” framework, whereby ad-hoc sensor networks are formed, taking advantage of
sensors (possibly embedded in mobile devices 54 ) to enable public and professional users to
gather, analyze and share geographically localized information [ 33 ] . Scientists have already
concluded from the many crowd-sourced experiments completed that individuals can act as
sensors to give useful results in a timely manner and can complement other sources of data
to enhance our situational awareness and improve our understanding and responses to such
events [ 34 ] .
6.3.3 Xoscillo—an open-source oscilloscope
As you are building your OSH for other projects, you may need to debug an electronic circuit.
Although a simple multimeter is an indispensable tool for doing this, as your projects become
more complex, you may need a more sophisticated tool to understand what is going on in
the circuit in the form of wave forms. This calls for an oscilloscope. The least expensive com-
mercially available oscilloscopes cost around a few hundred dollars. What if you could have
functional oscilloscope using only the inexpensive Arduino board you already have? You are
in luck. Xoscill o 55 is an inexpensive, open-source software oscilloscope that acquires data us-
ing an open-source Arduino microcontroller board (discussed in Chapter 4 ) or a Parallax USB
oscilloscope. It has been released under CC-BY-NC-SA. The Xoscillo does not have all of the
functionality of the high-end oscilloscopes, but it may meet many of your needs. There is no
need for extra hardware to get the basic functionality, but the maximum frequency is 7 kHz.
You can obtain up to four channels, but this lowers your sample rate (7/4 = 1.75 kHz). It has