As a teasearcher I sometimes used off the shelf equipment in radiation intense environments (on earth), it was still cheaper to replace them regularly than to buy dedicated radiation hardened equipment, which anyway would still fail, just a lot later. After learning which components would typically fail first, I found out how to add extra shielding around those components, giving them some extra lifetime. Space is a whole other matter though, which explains it's very high cost.
3 days ago
| 2
Space qualified parts can withstand more than 100 or 300 krad for reference. And there's a difference between radiation tolerant and radiation hardened components
3 days ago
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I will have to redesign my home lab to mitigate that issue.. 😋
5 days ago
| 23
Interesting! Also, apparently to express the danger from radiation to a human, you should use Sieverts for the unit, but for electronic equipment, Rads (or more recently the Gray) are the more accurate unit.
6 days ago | 6
To put some wildly guessed numbers to it, assuming some minimal shielding that'd probably trigger that reset about once a month. Give or take a few orders of magnitude for guessing about shielding and such.
5 days ago
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Definitely MIL 46F , 810H and 202G. Designing customized shields would be wonderful. A capable SBC which can withstand these conditions would be properly rad.
3 days ago | 0
If I'm not mistaken Ian Charnas has his own YouTube channel and it is absolutely hilarious
1 day ago (edited) | 0
the camera module does pretty well too in LEO environments, TID performance is respectable for the low low price
4 days ago
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As a former Radiographer, that is a hell of a lot of radiation before it reboots. But what type of radiation did they hit it with, or was it the "CRT cocktail"?
5 days ago
| 6
You would think that with the cost per kg of moving a payload to space they could spend a bit of money designing something better than using an RPi... It's not difficult to get access to radiation hardened ICs intended for space applications from manufacturers like Microchip.
5 days ago (edited) | 4
Do they have published data on this? Would be super useful for anyone else who wants to send a CM4 to space! Edit: They do have a PDF in the blog post!
4 days ago (edited)
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Better than the old pi that would crash from camera flashes lol
5 days ago
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I'm guessing more that you might expect but maybe not enough to be space rated 🙂🤷
6 days ago | 0
After the newest discovery about the core of Jupiter, I always wondered how they made computers that could handle the extreme amounts of X-Rays that Jupiter emits.
5 days ago | 1
Jeff Geerling
How much radiation can a Raspberry Pi handle in space? I asked Ian Charnas, the chief engineer for Mark Rober's Crunchlabs, and he shared a ton of great data on testing the CM4 while prepping for their SatGus cubesat launch!
Short answer, it reset (soft reboot) on average every 39.3 Rads on a cyclotron at UC Davis, and was killed (couldn't reboot anymore) at 57.8 kRad in the gamma radiation testing lab at University of Maryland!
Read more: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/how-much-radiation-… (thanks to Ian and Crunchlabs for sharing this data!)
6 days ago | [YT] | 1,399