Project Ara is arguably the most exciting project going on in the mobile world at the moment. For those of you who aren’t quite sure what Project Ara is, it is a project that both Google and Motorola are working on with hopes of bringing modular smartphones to the masses. A Project Ara smartphone will be comprised of an assortment of modules. A screen module, speaker module, battery module, you get the idea. Essentially every portion of a Project Ara smartphone will be its own separate module, allowing users to swap them out for different modules whenever they please.
This idea has got a bunch of companies excited and making prototype modules designed for Project Ara devices. A new module that has just popped up is rather different, making it stand out from the crowd a bit. The Russian company Intersoft has unveiled a radiation sensor module at the second Ara developers conference. Said radiation-sensing module is comprised of a dosimeter radiometer, which is a small but powerful silicon sensor that is capable of measuring the level of radiation in the users environment. The device is being called the DO-RA module and there are certainly no other Project Ara modules like it.
At the moment, Intersoft has three working prototypes of their DO-RA module. The three prototypes come in different sizes, the largest being 39x17x7 mm and the smallest being 18x18x3.5 mm. Along with their DO-RA module, the Intersoft team has also developed an Android app specifically designed to control their module. The implications of this very compact radiation sensing module are enormous and has got the Project Ara team pretty excited. The developers of the module say that it could be used by people who are in danger of being exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation in their line of work. People like police officers and pilots whose lives are often threatened by radiation. It would be great to see modular smartphones with these modules attached to one day replace big and expensive Geiger counters, but for now that remains a day far in the future, the prospect of it though, is amazing.