New Kickstarter – The Thunder Board – IOT Lightning Detection

November 16, 2017 Featured Topic, Grove, Grove Sensors, IOT, Kickstarter, Lightning, Projects, Raspberry Pi, SwitchDoc Products, Thunder Board

New Kickstarter  – The Thunder Board – Lightning Detection

The Thunder Board Kickstarter has launched
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The ThunderBoard – Lightning Detection Made Easy

 

Lightning and Thunder, Oh My!   This Kickstarter is all about allowing you at home to build an IOT (Internet Of Things) kit, with NO SOLDERING, that will detect lightning and send it up to the Internet.   And more than that, we provide you all the software, parts, great instructions so you can easily customize the kit to match with your computer and your DIY projects.

You can choose to just back the board or a number of different IOT kit projects.

Features

  • – Lightning Strength
  • – Lightning Count
  • – Lightning Distance
  • – Disturber (Electrical Noise) Detection
  • – IOT Kit
  • – Internet Dashboard Interface

What is in the ThunderBoard IOT Kit?

At SwitchDoc Labs we believe in learning by doing.   Building kits to learn about technology is a great way to advance your knowledge.   But these kits aren’t just designed for building and then you are done.  No, they are designed to be built and then MODIFIED to do other things and to provide even more learning experiences.

We provide detailed instructions, parts and the open source software code so you can do even more.   You will be amazed at what you can do with these kits.

Both of the Kits are based on Grove Connectors.  That means you can just plug things together with no chance of wiring things backwards and NO SOLDERING required.

The Arduino Kit contains:

  • – Grove Mini Pro LP Arduino (16MHz)
  • – Grove WiFi Interface
  • – Grove LCD Display
  • – Grove Buzzer
  • – The Thunder Board
  • – Grove Cables for Hooking it Up!
  • – USB Cable for Power
  • – FTDI Cable for Programming
  • – 3D Printing Files (Note:  Some kits include the 3D Printed Boxes)

 

Board Compatibility

The ThunderBoard is designed to work with the Arduino and ESP8266 in addition to the Raspberry Pi.

What is a Grove Connector?

The way we have been wiring I2C connections before just didn’t work for building fast and quick IOT projects.  Then we found Grove.

There are hundreds of Grove Devices from multiple manufacturers around the world.     Just for a quick look finds over 100 boards.

You can’t plug it in backwards.   If you put the connector in the wrong plug it just doesn’t work.  No smoke.  No fire. This makes us happy as we look over into our Box Of Death, filled with boards we have ruined.

We quickly found the Grove connectors and their respective cables very useful. With the large selection of Grove I2C devices available, we decided to include a Grove connector on all our future boards and products.

For more information, check out our full Grove Tutorial here.

Coming Next

Next up we talk about how a lightning detection board works.