• Part A - Thunder Board I2C Lightning Detector

• Part B - 3.3V to 5.0V I2C Hub and Voltage Translator

• Part C - 1 20cm Grove Cable

• Part D - 1 50cm Grove Cable

• Part E - 1 female to female jumper wire

How does this Kit work?

The ThunderBoard Lightning detector is based on an AS3935.   The ThunderBoard picks up lightning, puts it through a complex evaluation algorithm and then reports the results to the OurWeather Weather Station.

The Austrian Microsystems AS3935 is a programmable Lightning Sensor IC that detects the presence and approach of potentially hazardous lightning activity in the vicinity and provides an estimation on the distance to the head of the storm. The embedded lightning algorithm checks the incoming signal pattern to reject the potential man-made disturbers and various noise sources.

The AS3935 can also provide information on the noise level and inform OurWeather of the noise. It comes pre-calibrated, meaning that you don’t have to write complex frequency calculation code, you can simply program the correct calibration details and get cracking finding storms.

Every 5 seconds, OurWeather polls the ThunderBoard and picks up the latest information.

New Tutorial on Thunder Board

Here is a new video tutorial for Tuning the ThunderBoard by Dr. Shovic

What Does the ThunderBoard Kit Report?

The ThunderBoard Extender Kit supplies information to the OurWeather software.  Info will show up on the www.swithdoc.com/OurWeatherPage.html reporting page.

If you would like to read the lightning values directly, and you have an OurWeather kit, type the following into your browser:

http://IPNumber/ThunderBoardLast

where is the IP number of your OurWeather unit. For example, if your IP address of the OurWeather unit (viewable when the OurWeather Unit boots up - See OurWeather Assembly and Operations manual) is 192.168.1.141, then you would type:

http://192.168.1.141/ThunderBoardLast

and OurWeather returns the following to your browser:

{"ThunderBoardLast": "6 km,03/31/2018 19:06:38,6,Lightning detected,03/31/2018 19:06:38,1", "id": "1", "name": "OurWeather", "connected": true}

    The fields in order are:

•     as3935_LastLightning - Distance of the last lightning strike (e.g. 6 km)
•     as3935_LastLightningTimeStamp - Time of the last lightning strike
•     as3935_LastLightningDistance - integer distance (e.g. 7)
•     as3935_LastEvent - The last event recorded by the ThunderBoard (see below)
•     as3935_LastEventTimeStamp - Time Stamp of last event
•     as3835_LightningCountSinceBootup - Number of lightning strikes since bootup

Optional ThunderBoard Lightning Simulator

If you want to make testing your unit easier and on-demand, consider the ThunderBoard Lightning Simulator.

Downloads

• ThunderBoard Lightnng Detection Kit Assembly and Operations Manual

See the OurWeather product page for the Advanced Manual.