Safecast bGeigie Nano Geiger Kit with Bluetooth

This is a FANTASTIC little counter, for a number of reasons. The foremost, though, is that it has a professional-quality sensor. I've been monitoring radiation for a couple of decades now, the first 7-8 years as part of my job with industrial grade kit, but after that with lesser kit such as the Gamma Scout because the cost of professional-grade kit was just too high.I was a backer of the first Safecast product on Kickstarter - this has since become commercialized as the Medcom Onyx, and it's a fine instrument.The bGeigie, however, leaves the Onyx in the dust. It share the same sensor and basic circuitry, but the crucial difference in the bGeigie (the b stands for "bento", BTW) is the GPS. After the Fukushima disaster it became pretty much impossible to acquire decent meters, and so Safecast came up with the idea of adding a GPS to a Geiger and the bGeigie was born. The GPS allows sampling to be done dynamically by hanging it out your car window and driving around. The data files that result can be uploaded to Safecast where a mashup creates details and accurate radiation maps. This is citizen engagement at its best.Now to the kit - I've been designing and building analog electronic kit (mainly audio) for about four decades now, and so I class myself as a ninja-class wielder of a soldering iron for through-hole constructions. However, I have two of these, and I let my 14-year-old niece build the second one. It took her about 60 minutes of practice soldering on scrap kit and trivial pieces before I was happy to hand her the kit and let her build it. It took her around five hours from start to finish (mine took me just under three) and I was really proud that hers was almost as clean and neat as mine. Seriously, this can be built by a careful novice with less than an hour's experience behind the iron. Of course, using cheap tools does increase the risk of ruining it but I would personally feel happy building it successfully with a crappy iron.TL;DR - this is a GREAT kit for a beginner and gives you a GREAT instrument at the end.If you're wondering why I have two, it's because I modded one to have a beta window - the vanilla bGeigie is for measuring gamma, calibrated against a Cs-137 source.I've told you the good, but now for something that saddens me. It has zero to do with the device per se. It's simply that I got both my kits (in 2016, mind) for $450 each, and since then I've seen the price of the kit climb to $475 to $550 and now to $650 in a few months. Don't misunderstand me - this is definitely worth $650 relative to other counters (I believe the Onyx now retails for around $795 built) but this uses no custom parts except the PCB. I just don't understand how the price can have justifiably gone up almost 50% in a few months. I believe that $450 was a fair price based on part costs, and allowed the seller (KitHub) to make a fair profit on gathering the kit parts together. To me the price increase smacks of gouging based on the popularity and quality of the bGeigie combined with the continuing scarcity of affordable quality meters. I say this with some sadness since one of the KitHub founders was phenomenally helpful to me when my first kit had a couple of missing parts. Since this is open-source hardware I'm tempted to price up the kit and start selling kits myself.Anyway, if you're looking for a high-quality, versatile counter at less than a grand you just cannot beat the bGeigie.

Took us a couple hours to solder and some of the provided instructions were a little vague. We ended up having to use some online tutorials to finish it up. It was fun! Firing it up the first time we found out we had soldered the bluetooth board upside down. We had to remove it, de-solder the joints, and re-solder it back in the correct orientation. Once we had the bluetooth board correctly installed, it worked perfectly! We installed the app on our Samsung S8 Active. The app takes a few minutes to connect, but once it does, its fun to watch as it collects data. We now know that our area, 30 minutes south of Seattle Washington, is not a hot spot for radiation.Side note, we tried to use some cheap 30 Watt soldering gun and it was nearly impossible to solder. We ended up purchasing a Weller 40 Watt hobby craft soldering iron. That Weller made all the difference. Soldering each joint took seconds. We haven't soldered in decades so we were nervous about re-learning how to solder. We were afraid we might break something and since this item is not cheap, it made us even more nervous. We had an old audio video receiver laying around that was inoperable. We disassembled it and practiced on those boards before we tried assembling the Safecast bGeigie.All in all, we are glad we made this investment for our piece of mind. We were very excited to learn about Safecast and it's publicly available database considering the danger Fukushima poses to everyone. As we understand it, governments in many countries have enacted interesting rules about public release of radiation data. We decided we were willing to invest in this specific meter because of the public database and because we wanted to know if our area was at risk or not.If you are considering ordering one and are worried about assembling it, don't worry. You can do it too!

I started to assemble the kit only some time after I received it, but then it was all completed within a couple of hours. It took me a few contacts to get used to soldering again after more than 20 years, but it wasn't such a big deal when following the instructions and using some common sense. The unit worked right away, and now I'm able to collect information for SafeCast as well.

It is a great kit which measures radiation and GPS. I drive a car with the bGeigie Nano.

The online instructions are pretty clear, and I was able to put the kit together in a little under four hours.It has been ages since I soldered anything, so I had to buy a few tools, but nothing major.The batter came charged, and the device came on right away with no problems after it was assembled. It started taking measurements right away, and got a gps lock in a few minutes.

Worked perfectly once installed for the first time.

great！

easy build and works great. Happy with my purchase.