I was just going through some old measurements, and there’s a big spike on my meter on April 11th. Looks like there was a solar flare that day. I can’t see anybody else’s detector catching this though. Has anyone else seen a similar spike on their meter corresponding to the April 11th solar activity?
Also Radhoo props with the website. The new default radiation view is a definite improvement.
I actually bought one of those from Playing with Fusion. They have a little breakout board. I hooked it up to an Arduino Due which needed a bit of code modification but it worked. It’s… okay. It can detect most strikes, but the reliability is not great and it picks up a lot of noise. Most of the time it detects lightning as a “disturber” which means it knows some sort of electrical noise happened, but it can’t tell if it’s actually lightning. Also you can trigger it with the spark from a cigarette lighter.
That’s why you need a lot of these sensors to correlate them. But I found that an community driven lightning detection network already exists: https://www.lightningmaps.org
But I always find it interesting to see what some sensors can capture, even though they were never designed for it. And what you can achieve with mathematics. Cosmic background noise is maybe one of the best examples. 🙂
Yeah but you can’t just join up on Blitzortung that easily. I’ve been on a waiting list for years, and I keep re-applying. Nothing. And you can’t make your own circuit and contribute. You HAVE to buy all the components, get PCBs fabbed, solder the things together yourself, then program it.
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