Yarrow counter basic

Yarrow

Open software for Geiger counters: firmware for the FNIRSI GC-03, a BOINC monitor that reads several kinds of counters, and a desktop app. Together they feed a live, open map of the natural background dose rate, city by city.

Website: yarrow.athena.org.tr · Live map: bitboinc.athena.org.tr/yarrow.php · Data by city: bitboinc.athena.org.tr/yarrow_history.php · Releases: firmware per language and Yarrow Hub

3D Printed Dock: https://www.crealitycloud.com/tr/model-detail/6adf8eee3737a58cb2d2e141?profileId=6adf8eee3737a58cb2d2e147

The parts

Supported counters

Only raw pulse counts from the tube are accepted, never a rate the counter has smoothed itself. A new counter is one small driver in monitor/yarrow_src_*.c; see docs/boinc-monitor.md.

Join the map

1. Join bitboinc and attach your computer in the BOINC Manager.
2. In your project preferences select the Yarrow monitor and enter your country, city and (if you like) your detector.
3. Plug in the counter and leave the computer on. Only the city is shared, never a more exact place.

Yarrow Hub

Download yarrow-hub-windows-x64-setup.exe. It shows the live dose rate, keeps the history on your computer, draws statistics, shows nSv/h, µSv/h or µrem/h, rings alarms at levels you choose and exports CSV. With a GC-03 it also sets the clock, calibrates the tube and installs firmware. Built with Tauri (Rust and TypeScript); to build it: cd hub/app && cargo tauri build.

What the firmware does

Radiation

• Dose rate, counts per minute, dose today, this week and in total
• An averaging window that follows the rate: long and quiet at background, quick when the rate really changes, without leaning high or low
• Tube dead-time correction
• Three alarm levels with fixed thresholds you set yourself, hysteresis, an event log and an alarm that never fires from a handful of counts
• Dose budget, sample test (background against sample), sessions for trips, walks and surveys, a calibration wizard and a two-source dead-time wizard

Fields

• Electric and magnetic field readings with trends
• A finder that follows wires and field sources by sound and bars

Device

• Battery health, remaining run time, charge cycles, a charging screen
• A log designed for years in the mountains: lossless range-coded samples, power-fail safe, within a few percent of the theoretical minimum size
• Offline emergency guide
• 21 colour themes, pixel-art decoration, a self test
• USB serial protocol for the host tools

Install the firmware

Download the file for your language from Releases and copy it to the device in update mode. The stock bootloader is never touched, so the stock firmware can always be put back the same way. Step by step: docs/install.md.

Build the firmware

Needs arm-none-eabi-gcc, GNU make and Python 3 for the build helpers.

make                 # Turkish, build/yarrow-gc03.bin
make YLANG=en        # English, build/en/yarrow-gc03.bin
make release YLANG=en  # copies it to dist/yarrow-gc03-en.bin
make check           # host tests
make test            # runs the image in an ARM emulator
make sim             # renders every screen to build/sim

Details in docs/building.md.

Languages

Every language is its own firmware file, because the fonts take most of the room.

Adding one means copying src/lang/en.h, translating it and running tools/langcheck.py; a local model can do the first pass: docs/translating.md.

Documentation

Licence

GPL-3.0, see LICENSE. The Inter font in third_party/inter is under the SIL Open Font License.