The APOC radiation detector.

Some Kickstarter campaigns fail to get off the ground and never reach funding goals. A project created by two members of the StudentRND community, however, is having a much different experience.

Matt Chapman and David Stoyanov are developing an APOC Mini Radiation Detector to make it easy and efficient to monitor radiation. They launched their campaign last Monday with a $5,000 goal and just eight days later, they are already at $13,209 as of Tuesday afternoon.

The APOC is a fully-featured, mini gamma-ray detector with an open-sourced software that allows users to see energy level data.

Matt Chapman and David Stoyanov

Pledges range from $5 to $200, with options to assemble your own APOC or have it come ready to use out of the box. An APOC Advanced model comes with a rechargeable battery and Bluetooth capability.

There seem to be a lot of applications for this neat tool, whether it’s in the science classrooms or to help astronomers measure cosmic radiation.

Chapman and Stoyanov have now set a stretch goal of $30,000 to build an app that would allow users to easily stream data from the APOC to a smartphone, either via audio port or bluetooth. You can find out more info here.

StudentRND is a 3,500 square foot Bellevue skunk works of sorts where high-school and college students can drop in for free to build everything from low-cost surface computers to robotic pipe organs to video games. It was started three years ago by University of Washington computer science student Edward Jiang after he gathered some of his buddies from the robotics team who wanted to build more practical, real-world stuff. He’s created a community around an event during the school year called CodeDay, and an 8-week summer program called the StudentRND Incubator.

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