[HN Gopher] Lightning Detector Circuits
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Lightning Detector Circuits
Author : nateb2022
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-07-14 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techlib.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techlib.com)
| rkagerer wrote:
| Love to hear ideas on what you'd wire this up to - eg. What kind
| of device or process do you want to trigger once lightning is
| detected?
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Usually, lightning detection is necessary for regulatory
| compliance. Facilities with pools need to remove patrons to
| prevent risk of electrocution, summer camps need to move people
| to enclosed shelters, as with golf courses, construction sites,
| beaches/waterfronts, etc.
| cxcorp wrote:
| A camera! The 2.5mm TRS remote trigger jack just needs one of
| the pins connected to the sleeve to trigger the camera, very
| easy to do with an optocoupler or even relay.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| I spent a LOT of time on this website as a 90's kid. One of many
| that inspired me to get an EE degree. Projects like this always
| felt like some incredible magic, and came with an artistic
| aesthetic that I find inescapably captivating. We've instead got
| little bits of black epoxy everywhere these days and it's just
| not the same!
| bri3d wrote:
| I was recently introduced to fully integrated lightning sensor
| ICs: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-
| highlight/a/ams/as3935-fr... - supply it a repurposed RFID coil
| and it will tell you when it detects lightning and how far the
| storm front is. I have one in my weather station just for fun,
| but it's a highly practical device for golf courses, swimming
| pools, sporting facilities, etc. where knowing how far away
| lightning is is operationally important.
| Neywiny wrote:
| I was considering one of these recently. By chance do you have
| any feedback on how well it works relative to the detection and
| the storm front tracking?
| gh02t wrote:
| I _hate_ these chips after a multi-year crusade to get one to
| work. I 've bought 3 different variations of it on breakout
| boards (SparkFun, DFRobot, and another one off of Tindie) and
| spent 10s of hours fiddling with them trying to get them to
| work with no luck. That includes multiple attempts at tuning
| the antenna and calibrating the capacitance, tuning all the
| other detection parameters, multiple different
| microcontrollers, several different power supplies and
| physical arrangements etc in case of interference. Anything
| and everything I could think of and test.
|
| Everything I did failed and I have never been able to get
| anything other than noise out of these sensors at best. YMMV,
| as I know these chips have a history of problems but
| supposedly do actually work. After I finally gave up on these
| things I ended up getting an Acurite 06045M, a cheapo SDR
| dongle, and a Pi Zero W running rtl_433 for like $60 and that
| has worked perfectly for years and is fairly straightforward
| to plug into Home Assistant over MQTT. It very reliably
| detects strikes and gives a pretty good estimate of distance
| (but NOT bearing), plus you get an outdoor temp/humidity
| sensor for free.
|
| I think the 06045M might actually use the AS3935 internally
| so presumably you _can_ get them to work and when they do
| work they work very well, but nothing I could do as a (pretty
| advanced and well-equipped) hobbyist could make them work,
| and I 've heard others had similar issues with them. So maybe
| stick to buying something commercial with it inside?
| bri3d wrote:
| Yes, that Acurite sensor and the one I have connected to my
| weather setup (Shenzhen Fine Offset / Ambient Weather) are
| all AS3935 based. I also have an Aliexpress "JMCU" AS3935
| breakout/antenna board that I bought to play with after
| being pleased with the Ambient Weather sensor, and it seems
| to work OK to me as well - I had to tune the watchdog
| thresholds and gain to eliminate false positives, but after
| doing so it works great.
| gh02t wrote:
| I did try tuning the watchdog thresholds/gain too but
| never had much luck. I read a few places that there might
| have been problems with some of the early AS3935 chips
| (but could never find too much info) and I know there
| were problems with some of the breakout boards on
| Aliexpress having the wrong capacitors on the board
| (which was another thing I tested/fixed). The one thing I
| never tried was all my boards are fairly old so they
| might have whatever the original hardware flaw is and
| maybe newer ones work as intended.
|
| I've been mighty tempted to try again with a newer one as
| I really want to build a compact portable lightning
| sensor linked to Meshtastic but I dread going through the
| whole ordeal again.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Hmmm so they're fiddly is what it comes down to. I was
| thinking of the one from Mikroe. The 06045M has the same
| 40km as that chip so I believe the other commentor that
| it's the same chip. Thanks
| gh02t wrote:
| I get reliable detection out to about 25-30 km, but it
| depends on your placement and local RF environment. I
| hung my Acurite sensor on a nail up under a roof eave out
| of direct sunlight so as to get reasonably accurate air
| temperature readings and that seems to be pretty good for
| lightning as well. I'm in a bit of a valley which
| probably limits my range somewhat, I am fairly confident
| the 40 km range is possible with the right placement.
| Neywiny wrote:
| Good to know, thank you
| bitwrangler wrote:
| Here is a board ready to use:
|
| https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-lightning-detector-as3935....
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was heavily involved with the local soccer community, and
| as a coach/referee I carried my own detector that I paid less
| for a ready to go version than this DIY shield. I was not
| going to depend on someone else's gear functioning when these
| were so cheap.
| gh02t wrote:
| Got a link to that detector? The cheapest self-contained
| lightning sensor in a portable form factor I know of
| nowadays is the Acurite 02020 and it's around ~$50
| nowadays.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's interesting. That's the same one I have, but I
| only paid $27.99 for it. I couldn't remember what the
| model was, but Amazon shows that I purchased that model
| and clicking the View Order link it shows $27.99. I guess
| I bought at the right time??? Maybe it's tariffed to
| death?
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm interested in this type of device in a boating situation.
| The network based systems wouldn't work for me.
|
| Can somebody provide clarity on if any of the boards really
| work?
|
| It seems that bri3d has faith in the ScioSense.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| They do but without information from additional locations all
| you can get is distance and sometimes direction (dependent on
| specific chip / circuit). The ones with direction will
| probably good enough for most boating awareness situations.
|
| If you want to know more specifically you need to have
| separate sensors that have with reasonably synchronized
| clocks so they can trilaterate or triangulate strike
| locations. Those sensors probably need to be further away
| from each other than most boats allow for. The further away
| the sensors are from each other, the tighter the time
| synchronization between them, and the more sensors you have
| will determine the overall accuracy your system will be able
| to attain.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > so they can trilaterate or triangulate strike locations
|
| I don't think that's feasible. These sensors work by
| detecting radio waves which propagate near the speed of
| light. Even if you had two sensors separated by 1 km,
| they'd both receive the radio signal within ~3 us of each
| other. I don't think the sensors guarantee detection time
| to that level of precision, nor that it's feasible to keep
| clocks sufficiently synchronized that you can timestamp
| events at a sub-microsecond level.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| You're partially right for the case of trilateration,
| usually these would be placed about 10km apart with a GPS
| PPS clock (at least) and would be using sensors with a
| much faster response rate.
|
| With triangulation you only need the clocks accurate
| enough to correlate the events. This will largely be
| determined by the rate you see events, and you only need
| to distinguish specific events if you want to
| differentiate locations of individual strikes as opposed
| to a storm front. For a boating case you probably only
| care about the location of a storm front.
|
| Two sensors measuring angles from a couple dozen meters
| apart can get you a pretty precise location of storm
| front especially when aggregating results from multiple
| detections.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Better yet, this network
|
| https://www.lightningmaps.org/#m=ses;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;ts=0;
|
| triangulates lightning strikes detected by this method. Right
| now I see a front moving between the Triple Cities area and
| Scranton.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Makes me think of the World Wide Lightning Location Network
|
| > We welcome offers of hosting a new WWLLN lightning sensor. All
| hosts receive all the world-wide data for their own research.
|
| https://wwlln.net/#home
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Skip the perfboard with nails and you would have had an actual
| breadboard... What a weird prototyping approach... Nails in a
| perfboard... Never seen it before.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Honestly I really like the low tech steampunk? kind of vibe of
| nails in a board.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I have plenty of PoCs that were built from whatever lumber I
| happened to have available. It's much faster than waiting for
| something to 3D print. A DIYer's garage without scraps of
| various cuts of lumber is just broken.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Its an interesting take on old-school point-to-point wiring
| using turrets:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-point_construction
|
| https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/2020/07/22/prototypi...
|
| I assume the author liked the idea and used the
| perfbaord/punchboard as a grid.
| panki27 wrote:
| Real time, community sourced lightning map:
| https://www.blitzortung.org/
|
| Posted this some time ago, but it got no traction :(
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Well. I bookmarked it now. Seems to have got an update, since
| the last time I looked at it. Meaning it just works. But not
| necessarily better than the lighntingmaps.org I've used
| instead. Different styles for the same thing. Will check in the
| future from Hamburg, .de and Aspen, CO how accurate it really
| is.
| forsalebypwner wrote:
| My understanding is that lightningmaps.org is owned/operated
| by Blitzortung (see the upper right corner of
| lightningmaps.org).
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Could be, I seem to recall some relationship. It was just
| that blitzortung didn't work right for me. While
| lightningmaps did. Anyways. That's from years (maybe 10?)
| ago.
|
| Maybe my browser just got better? Who knows :-)
|
| By working right, I mean whenever I see flickering from
| afar, or hearing the first rolling of thunder, clicking on
| it without much fuss, maybe zooming out, shifting a little,
| zooming back in and seeing what's going on where instantly.
|
| Which in the context of larger storms works even better in
| kachelmannwetter.com, because there it's embedded in other
| data, and projected where it moves/arrives in how many
| minutes in easily understandable symbology. But that's for
| Germany only. Useless for Colorado. Havn't found something
| comparable for there, so far. Would be mostly useless
| anyways, because weather at 2600+ m altitude changes
| faster. Or can.
| progbits wrote:
| On one hand I really like that project and what they do, but on
| the other hand I hate how it's managed.
|
| I was very excited about it over ten years ago and wanted to
| join the network. They are very weird about not releasing the
| designs and code, and instead want you to get it from them.
| Fair enough, but then they don't produce and ship units. I
| signed up for a waiting list like 10 years ago, with many
| others. They kept promising a new design, but never delivered
| it, and didn't let anyone else do so. I never heard back from
| them about the waiting list.
|
| They are also restrictive about access to the data if you are
| not in the network, with reasons like it's too expensive. That
| might have been true 10-15 years ago, but today it's just
| silly.
|
| It's a shame, I think there is lot of potential to make a
| better community and more usable free apps around this data.
| But you would have to start a new network from scratch because
| these people are not interested in that.
| bityard wrote:
| It's been around long enough that I think it's pretty well
| known by now. At any rate, it was posted 11 months ago by
| someone else and has a number of comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370187
| ronsor wrote:
| I just learned about it today. https://xkcd.com/1053/
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I remember seeing an overly simplified lightning detector
| presented in a book: just an antenna, Neon bulb and a ground
| wire. I thought it was too simple to work.
|
| Here it is discussed though by someone who tried it (and improved
| it):
|
| https://www.angelfire.com/oh3/ebjoew/Charged_Cloud_Alert.htm...
|
| (Ha ha, angelfire)
| exabrial wrote:
| > Watch out; there's a smaller, identical-looking bolt just a few
| inches tall
|
| Pahaha pure Spinal Tap moment
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