I am not able to motivate further, it's just that usually when we talk about random numbers we mean uniformly distributed random numbers. It is not a requirement in a strict sense. It's just the easier way to tell about randomness. We all have an intuitive understanding of rolling a dice or flipping a coin.
Yep but the main point that i was trying to make is that to get a faster generator you need a faster clock and a bigger timer, not a bigger detector nor more events, if you cannot back them up with the faster clock and bigger timer
The throughput is given by the frequency of the radioactive events. This can easily made bigger with a more radioactive source. The limit in this is how fast is the underlying reference timer. If you could have a fast enough timer, you could raise the radioactivity of the source and get a bigger throughput.
I should try and see. The inhibit from the monostable timer could somewhat "transfer" the randomness source from the geiger to the time constant of the 555
However I don't think you'd be able to easily manipulate the random stream.
By triggering the random tube you just generate a random number, but even by triggering it continuously you cannot directly manipulate the bytes. The counter is not reset after every event.
Moreover: the timer/counter is clocked at 20M, for a 16 bit timer it overflows every 3ms. The tube is inhibited for a similar amount of time by a monostable 555. And this inhibit time is controlled by an RC network that is separated from the timer/counter crystal. So even noise and fluctuation on this two clock sources generate some randomness.
I'm not saying that it is impossible to manipulate, I'm saying congrats if you figure out a way.
Author here. There is a part 2 that explains the generation in detail, you find it linked below the part 1, or at the link [0].
The banana does not make a significant difference (the generator can operate without it), however the potassium in general can definitely be detected. I've made some test with KCl and the increase in counts is huge. In the end this is not very important for the purpose of the project: i just wanted to tell a story involving true random number generation from radioactivity, and the radioactive banana is very functional for this purpose.
Absolutely 100% more fun.