Lightning Detector

Modern day lightning detector that is based on the SparkFun AS3935 sensor, 2 Raspberry Pi Picos and a Waveshare LoRamodule

HAM RADIOSDRHAMCLOCKADS-B

9/5/20261 min read

In 1895 Alexander Popov built the first long-range radio wave receiver to detect lightning strikes, which doubled as the world's first radio receiver. It was crudely tuned to about 500KHz; and would ring a bell for near-by lightning strikes. The SparkFun ciruit I am using also has 500KHz resonant tank and a microcontroller running an algorithm to weed out man-made noise and spikes caused by fluorescent lamps, lawn mower spark plugs, electric motors, TV sets and computers.

SparkFun Lightning Detector - AS3935

The final system had a Waveshare LoRa transceiver and a Pico MCU as the Meshtastic transceiver, with another Pico and the SparkFun sensor tied in using its UART. The system detects lightning and sends a text to my Meshtastic sensor network.

my Arduino C++ code

The first lightning sensor I tried was from DFRobot, which was build for I2C communication. This failed; and upon further research, many hobbyist complained about unreliable I2C com. So I used the SparkFun sensor and a SPI interface, whick worked. However, I had to replace my MicroPython code on a Pico MCU with Arduino C++ code and library. It took some doing; but I got it to work.