OurWeather Extender Kit Released – ThunderBoard Lightning Detection

April 2, 2018 Alexa, ESP8266, Grove Sensors, Lightning, OurWeather, Products, SwitchDoc Products, Thunder Board, Weather, WeatherPlus, WeatherRack
Lightning Detection

OurWeather Extender Kit Released – ThunderBoard Lightning Detection

The OurWeather family of no-soldering weather kits has just grown by one.   SwitchDoc Labs has released the ThunderBoard Lightning Detection Extender Kit.   The kit is in stock and available as of April 2, 2018.    As always, we are supplying this product with Grove connectors which makes it easy to hook up, with no soldering.

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What is OurWeather?0070G

OurWeather is an ESP8266 based  connected weather station containing 7 different sensors that will teach about electronics, software and theunspecified-8 copy weather.   It contains all the sensors and wires to make a fully functional, WiFi weather station.   No software programming is required, it works right out of the box. However, if you want to change the way OurWeather works, add your own software or do something entirely different, we have the Open Source software available.   And what is one of the coolest features of OurWeather?   Building the kit requires NO SOLDERING. It uses Grove Connectors.    It is all plug and play based building, with a full step-by-step photograph based instruction manual.  It is a safe and educational way to learn about weather, electronics and science topics.   You can watch our successful kickstarter video here: https://youtu.be/pw6hSNSQnsM

 

What is the ThunderBoard Lighting Detection Kit?

The ThunderBoard Lightning Detection kit is based around the AS3935 Lightning Detector Chip, heart of the SwitchDoc Labs Grove ThunderBoard Lightning Detector.   All Grove cables, wires and an dual 3.3v/5V converter and I2C hub is installed (providing 6 more I2C connections!) to provide the buffering for the ThunderBoard and the ESP8266, which is the computer used in the OurWeather kit.

The Kit contains:

 How does the ThunderBoard work?

How the heck do we detect lightning?  You would think it would be pretty easy, but it turns out it is not.   It’s not just like a giant spark.   Well, it is a giant spark, but there are lots of other things that make electrical noise that can be confused for lightning.  Your computer (even your Raspberry PI and Arduino!), your car, the motor in your refrigerator, your cell phone, your computer monitor, your AM/FM radio and even your TV.  They all make electrical noise that can be confused with Lightning.

The Thunder Board Grove I2C Lightning Detector (based on the AS3935) for the Raspberry Pi and Arduino (and now the ESP8266!) – is a programmable Lightning Sensor board 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.

 

What does it Report?

The ThunderBoard Lightning Detector reports the following information to OurWeather, which uses the information in the display and also reports it to Alexa and to PubNub.

It records the following information:-as3935_LastLightning – Distance of the last lightning strike (e.g. 7km)

  • -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

If you have a ThunderBoard connected to OurWeather it will also show up on www.switchdoc.com/OurWeatherPage.html when connected to your OurWeather station (see the OurWeather manual).

Overall, the three types of events that the ThunderBoard will report are:

INT_NH Interrupt: Noise level too high, try adjusting noise floor

INT_D Interrupt: Disturber detected

INT_L Interrupt: Lightning Detected. 

Advanced Features

In addition to the display and data service provided by OurWeather, you can also access the information from your Raspberry Pi or desktop on OurWeather via the REST interface built into the software.

ThunderBoardLast Returns all the current lightning information from OurWeather {“ThunderBoardLast”: “20 km,03/31/2018 14:37:54,20,Lightning detected,03/31/2018 14:37:54,1”, “id”: “1”, “name”: “OurWeather”, “connected”: true}
ThunderBoardParams Returns the current ThunderBoard Parameters {“ThunderBoardParams”: “2,1,7,0,2,2”, “id”: “1”, “name”: “OurWeather”, “connected”: true}

For more information about the REST interface and the wealth of data that OurWeather provides, check out the Advanced Programming Manual, available in the downloads section of the OurWeather product page.

Coming Next?

You can also tune the ThunderBoard to fit your environment.   More on that in a future post.    You can see the tuning parameters on the bottom of the OurWeatherAdmin administration page below: