I have a Geiger Counter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger_counter) that measures beta, gamma, and X-ray radiation in counts per minute.
The Geiger counter cannot distinguish between those types of radiation, and does not know from which direction the radiation originated.
I don't have any strong radioactive sources in my home that I know of, so I assume the Geiger counter is measuring only the natural background radiation in the local environment of the counter.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation)
Some of the background radiation measured comes from the decay of radioactive isotopes in the earth. Another component of the background radiation comes from cosmic rays, originating in outer space.
Average background radiation counts per minute varies somewhat by geographic location. (you can find a map on the internet if you are interested)
However, our atmosphere helps shield us from the cosmic ray component of the background. The Wikipedia article above notes that the city of Denver, Colorado (5200 feet elevation) receives approximately twice the amount of radiation from cosmic rays as a city at sea level.
The raw data file logged by the counter was originally formatted as a .csv file produced by Microsoft Excel.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values)
(I had to rename the file to the extension .txt to get around some Microsoft-created problems. The file content is unchanged, only the name has been changed.
The file looks like the following when displayed using the vi text editor. Other text editors may show dozens of commas after the data on each line.
(it may display quite differently in other text editors or in Excel):
GQ Electronics LLC, GMC Data Viewer, Version 2.40
Date Time, uSv/h, CPM, #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #21, #22, #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34, #35, #36, #37, #38, #39, #40, #41, #42, #43, #44, #45, #46, #47, #48, #49, #50, #51, #52, #53, #54, #55, #56, #57, #58, #59, #60,
FEDERAL-WAY, , ,
2018-04-06 17:13, Every Minute, 16,
2018-04-06 17:14, Every Minute, 18,
2018-04-06 17:15, Every Minute, 15,
2018-04-06 17:16, Every Minute, 15,
There is an option on the Geiger counter to log location data - those are the lines in the file that contain the string "Federal Way".
After I inspected the log file, I found that every time the location was written to the log file, the Geiger counter skipped logging one or two minutes of data. I turned off the location logging around the end of April 2018 in the file, and never turned it back on.
For this project, you are only interested in lines that look like the last few above: The time and date the data was taken, and the number of counts per minute (the integer at the end of the line).
Your program will read a file with the above format named '7_14_2019.txt'. A link to the file is located under the Resources block in WAMAP.
The file consists of over a year of background radiation measurements, one measurement per minute. The first data line in the file shows that at time 17:13 on April 6th, 2018, 16 radiation events were counted.
For this programming project:
Write the date and counts per minute to the console for those data lines in the format:
Date Counts per minute
5-06-18 35
6-17-18 33
. .