StormSafe

An estimated 6000 to 24000 people are killed annually due to lightning strikes.  In the US, the most fatalities occur while fishing, camping, and boating.  What if you were personally warned when lightning was a risk nearby, without having to continuously monitor the radio or NOAA?

This project plans to pair a realtime lightning detector, which has a sensing range of 40km, with a mobile device for getting an accurate lat/long position.  It queries a WeatherUnderground API to get local details and screens the results for thunderstorm alerts.  Any of these will trigger a color-coded LED to warn the user to seek lower ground and shelter.

The lightning sensor we are using is the AS3935, on a breakout board from PlayingWithFusion.  I've verified its functionality with an Arduino UNO.

We're still determining the ideal combination of portability and capability for the microcontroller that will play the centerpiece of this. Considerations include the Metawear, Spark Core, and FRDM-K64F.  GPS coordinates will either be done through a connected Android or iPhone, or a GPS shield if one is available.  Weather API would be done over that phone if no direct (SIM/Cellular) access is an option.

We attempted to use AT&T M2X, unfortunately we kept running into external Wifi issues with our location and it wasn't integrated for the presentation.

In the picture below, you can see the progress we made over the two days with the circuit. From left to right:

Intel Edison with Arduino breakout board, nested in bottom half of 3D printed case

- on breakout is a small vibrating buzzer for haptic feedback (small black disk visible just below and to the right of the Edison)

Small protoboard holding:

- transistor for supplying extra current to the animated Flux circuit

- small push button for resetting the circuit after it's tripped by lightning or an arc. Had we gotten as far as completing the mobile app, the app would have done the reset.

- AS3935 breakout board as seen above.

Top half of 3D printed case holding:

- RGB LED that is green indicating "all clear" and waiting for lighting input. Toggles to red when lightning is triggered.

- 6x White LEDs and 1 color cycling RGB LED that spruce up the look of the Flux Capacitor

-74HC595 shift register to perform the LED motion.

- (not seen) - A small Arduino Pro mini that was used to offload the animation of the Flux circuit so that Edison could focus on servicing the interrupts from the lightning breakout and communicating with the app.. It is affixed to underside of top case.

2x 9V batteries. Ideally this should be just one, but we found that it had trouble powering the Edison, 2 breakout boards, Arduino, and 8 LEDs, so as an interim solution we powered the two parts of the circuit separately.