WISRD Research & Engineering Journal

background radiation affecting the detectors from the sand. The boxes containing the PMTs were painted with Henry's Aluminum Paint™ to reflect as much solar energy as possible to reduce heating (Fig. 16).

Figure 16 . Painting the boxes with Henry’s Aluminum Paint TM to reflect solar radiation. Anti-static PVC pipe was connected from the detectors, through the box, and to the power control box which houses the DAQ board, a rechargeable battery, and the Raspberry Pi. Three D printed adapters 3 were designed to reduce the size of the PVC pipe coming out of the box. A rechargeable battery powered by a solar panel provides power to the scintillators, while the Raspberry Pi is powered using a power-over-ethernet (POE) switch and ethernet cable running to the roof.

Figure 17 . Two of the four detectors in light tight/waterproof boxes with adapters attached. 6. Detecting Cosmic Ray Showers For the first attempt at detecting cosmic ray showers, detectors 1 and 2 were stacked together and detectors 3 and 4 were stacked together, with a separation of 15 ft between each stack. Data was collected for the month of April (Fig 18). Each data set represents about 12 hours of data to ensure that files were a manageable size and to protect against detector failure. Settings are shown in Fig. 19. The event gate width is set to 100 ns and the detector coincidence is 1 since we only have the one detector. The channel coincidence is set at 2 meaning that a “count” requires at least two detectors to fire within 100 ns. Hit coincidence, the last field, gives the minimum number of hits on any detector within the 100 ns. We arbitrarily set this to 8 for our analysis.

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