Pomelo detector on the shoulders of giants

I got the scintillators I intended to use with this detector and have some performance plots with them in this project log. With them the hand-held detector is also starting to look better. I added top & bottom laser cut acrylic plates as basic protection of both electronics as well as of fingers from the ~80V generated by the bias circuit.

The detector consists of a top user interface & connectivity board based on the ESP32-C6 (Pomelo Zest), and a bottom gamma spectroscopy board (Pomelo Core). The power consumption of these two boards can be measured individually:

Pomelo Core:

• active: ~3 mA at background radiation levels

Pomelo Zest:

• active, connected to WiFi: 50 mA
• active, LCD backlight on: 70 mA
• active: 40 mA
• light sleep: 0.7 mA
• deep sleep: 0.35 mA
• deep sleep with SD card inserted: 0.65 mA

On future board revisions I intend to gate the power to the LCD and SD card.

Here are some pictures of the detector with its laser cut acrylic protection plates.