Lightning Detector

[longjohn119]

Knowing there was lighting somewhere, and at what distance, would be useful, but I'd really like to know which direction it is.

Unfortunately to do something like that you would need a minimum of 3 stations more advanced with directional antenna send the data via the Internet and triangulate them.  But if you have internet access already a far cheaper solution is to use a website like blitzortung.org or lightningmaps.org or one of the various national services The people that contribute to these networks usually have homemade system from a partial kit but are land based although they have a much larger range. Most are essentially radios tuned below the AM band at around 400 kHz. As far as I know there isn't even a professional lightning detection device that's directional in stand alone use and all are networked in some way

Now what you could do because no one wants to waste data with 24/7 monitoring of a website would be to use an AS3935 to alert you lightning is in the area and then you could go check either of these websites for exact location although it's mostly coastal coverage other than around east of Australia, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean

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Interesting suggestion! I could envisage a "ESP32-WiFi-bluetooth battery" based solution to be rather useful. Would send a mqtt message to OP but what then?
Just triggering an alarm? Or is the AS3935 also providing directional information.

Definitely worth further investigation.

It basically sends an alert, distance and counts lightning strikes and sends it as text data. One I built is a portable unit with Arduino Pro Mini and a Nokia 5110 display  and when it senses a strikes it flashes the backlight and shows you the number of strikes since you turned it on and the approximate distance of the last strike. The other one is hooked to an Arduino Nano and I plug it into my computer's USB port and it sends the data to CoolTerm which adds a time stamp and logs the distance to a file. You can also use the serial monitor in the Arduino IDE. The device just sends a detection pulse/signal and a distance number in km and the Arduino code formats it into a sentence and/or converts to miles and keeps a running count.  I'd probably do it with a Pro Mini or a Nano and add an ESP 8266 to it to send the data unless I come across a Library for the ESP32 ..... I can hack together some boilerplate code and usually make things work but writing a Library is a bit above my skill level, I'm a hardware guy. I'm still reading the docs on Signal K but it shouldn't be a problem to format the data into something SK can use, in fact it looks like it would be pretty straight forward

The output of the CoolTerm log looks like this: (This was a pretty active storm and that's just 2 minutes of data) 

2017-07-21 18:46:48 Lightning detected 17 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:46:50 Lightning detected 17 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:46:59 Lightning detected 17 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:03 Lightning detected 17 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:03 Lightning detected 17 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:05 Lightning detected 14 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:10 Lightning detected 12 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:16 Lightning detected 12 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:21 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:21 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:32 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:38 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:39 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:45 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:48 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:51 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:51 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:47:57 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:02 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:03 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:06 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:13 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:24 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:28 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:34 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:41 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:43 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:45 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.

2017-07-21 18:48:48 Lightning detected 5 kilometers away.