Re: Acurite Lightning Detector Sensor Tear-Down

folks have been playing with the AS3935 for a few years now.  since hobbyboards closed its doors and stopped offering its one-wire lightning detector, the AS3935 is positioned to take over that niche.  there is a package easily connected to the rpi or arduino:

https://www.embeddedadventures.com/as3935_lightning_sensor_module_mod-1016.html

and there is a service for weewx to read it:

https://github.com/weewx/weewx/wiki/as3935

or you can use the weewx-sdr driver to pick up the signals from the acurite lightning sensor:

https://github.com/matthewwall/weewx-sdr

rob and george have reverse engineered most of the data that the acurite lightning sensor spits out:

http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=30139.0

i've used the hobbyboards 1-wire detector in a few different locations.  one of them works flawlessly, another other will periodically detect hundreds of lightning strikes in an hour every second week or so.  a third location has many spurious detections, but i suspect that is due to proximity to some HVAC equipment.

i'm still getting to know the acurite detector.

its hard to know without a proper survey, but weewx users of the AS3935 seem to have mixed experiences.  at the very least, the rpi configuration requires a bit of parameter tuning.  newer versions of the hardware might have resolved this a bit.  search for AS3935 in the weewx-user forum topics for details.

m