Graphing radiation with a GMC-320 geiger counter using Cacti

A few years ago, right after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, XKCD released an awesome Radiation Dose Chart. Also around that time portable geiger counters became much easier to get a hold of and fairly cheap. Me being a data nerd; I researched a variety of devices and decided to get a CQ GMC-320. Its an awesome portable geiger counter that has a USB data-port on it that allows you to collect the CPM via a USB serial port. The following Cacti template and Python script is how I generated the following Graph.

Template: cacti_graph_template_gmc-320_-_cpm_values.zip

Additional GMC-320 Links

• Amazon Link
• User Guide
• Communication Details

This Cacti template will import/update the following items:

CDEF

• Trend
• Geiger - sV [ALL]
• Geiger - sV [AVG]
• Geiger - mR [ALL]
• Geiger - mR [AVG]

GPRINT Preset

• Normal
• Exact Numbers
• MicroSievert
• Interger
• MilliRoentgen

Data Input Method

• GQ - GMC-320Re 3.22

Data Template

• GQ - CPM

Graph Template

• GMC-320 - CPM values