Lightning Detection with Arduino

Summer heat and those amazing afternoon thunderstorms are already starting, so I'm thinking of adding a lightning detector to my DIY weather station. I've wanted a lightning sensor for a while, but they have always been expensive, tricky to calibrate, and had a bad reputation for hobby level users.

However, two things have changed this year and both make it possible for even an amateur like myself to connect a reliable lightning sensor to my Arduino - all for around $30 USD.

My DIY weather-station needed a lightning detector sensor for my Arduino base unit. Luckily there are several good options that are easy and cheap to buy and install.

First, vendors have recently begun selling reliable, easy-to-use boards based on the AS3935 detector chip. Even better, the supporting code libraries and tutorials are finally understandable to mere mortals. With that combination, I expect to see more options like this coming onto the market.

Second, I now know enough to hack into those cheap commercial lightning sensors, take the alert/alarm signals and feed them into my microcontroller - all without destroying the sensor. That might be simple for you, but it's a big deal for me.

(If you just want to watch the lightning strikes visit Lightningmaps.org or Blitzortung.org or make your own node at en.blitzortung.org/cover_your_area.php.)

Weather Station Might Need Some Rework

I'm thinking this might be a good time to rework the interface for my DIY Bluetooth weather station. Sure, I can tell a lot about the precipitation and wind just by looking at the station, but it's not sending any useful data to the display.

It might be time to bring the weather station inside so I can manually control the physical inputs. It's too cold to be outside and it's always fun to sit in the living room madly twisting, spinning, blowing and shaking a large plastic porcupine of sensors while looking at quickly moving, squiggly lines on my phone..

Weather stations in winter can be a bit unreliable. My "rain gauge" reads zero, but I'm pretty sure there has been some precipitation recently just from looking. I might bring it inside and work on the graphic display of the Bluetooth receiver.

I'm not looking forward to coding again, at least not this project. It works now, works very well in fact. But from what I remember I wrote some good, tight code - then got excited and went on an experimental streak. So there is probably lots of orphaned threads and poorly conceived routines wrapped around the well written, well documented portion of the program.

However, after a few months of successful testing with a Bluetooth data stream, I realize that I need to use another communication protocol with a longer range (probably LORA) so I can get the weather station into an area where the wind and rain won't be affected by surrounding structures. With Bluetooth I can only get 40-50 feet away from the house. But with LORA I could easily get 250 feet. That's enough to get the sensors out into an unobstructed area.

The station and my DIY display works well enough to give me a reasonable idea of what's going on and a basic record of overnight activity. But I also want to add a few more capabilities and display features.

If I do actually work on the display I'll try to document the process this time. It's actually pretty cool and fun to play with - plus it uses some basic interface techniques I've re-used several times. The real problem with blogging about it is that there is Android code, Arduino code, interface concerns, data storage and translation and .... well you get the picture. There's a lot going on.

But maybe if I write about each part as it happens I won't get bogged down in trying to create one huge, master tutorial. At the very least, I'll post some pics of the interface.

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