Did you ever see a high-tech project and think, “I could make that”? Well, I think we could make this!
(Yes, I changed the title. Their’s was too ambiguous. Mine is so much better, don’t you think?)
"Three undergraduate students and their professor have built a particle detector for just a little bit over $500. Their design could help bring particle physics experiments to universities everywhere.
"‘We wanted to build the RICH detector for less-than-rich universities,’ Pritchard explained on Saturday to an audience at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore.
“‘It is just a modified camera,’ said McKee, her adviser, specifically a Sony A3000 digital camera, which made up most of the project’s cost of a little over $500. The team chose the camera because it has a large image sensor, based on a relatively inexpensive technology known as CMOS, which is very sensitive to light for its cost.”
“Particle Physics On The Cheap”
http://www.insidescience.org/blog/2015/04/13/particle-physics-cheap?dm_i=1ZJY%2C3BFTZ%2CDYSB81%2CBVENG%2C1