Since we are putting this chip on the REV C cellular WeatherLab weather station board, I decided I needed some experience with it, so I bought the demo kit from Mouser. Another primary reason was to get their Lightning Emulator board so we would have something to test our boards with.
It was $269.68 plus shipping.
The kit include:
AS3935 Franklin Lightning Sensor™ board
Lightning Emulator Board
CR2032 and CR2450 battery cells
USB cable
Software + Documentation on USB stick
The detector board includes a PIC24 chip to control and access the Franklin chip, an LCD display, a beeper, and a USB port for connecting to a computer.
The emulator has 5 buttons: Disturber (creates a signal that is not lightning), Noise, and Far Strike, Mid Strike, and Close Strike.
It all works as you would think, as long as the emulator is the appropriate distance from the detector. If you get them too close, all strikes are detected as disturbers.
On power-up the detector board automatically tunes the receive antenna, displaying the results on the display.
When a strike is detected, the display shows the "energy" of the strike in a unitless number. In testing, the lowest "far away" number I saw was 414, the largest "close" strike was 54,501.
In between strikes, the display shows the distance to the approaching storm: Storm far way, approaching storm, storm overhead, departing storm, etc. with an estimate in km as to the distance to the leading edge.
The distances are in 14 steps from 40 km to 1 km.
While writing this, the detector board apparently detected my laptop as a Disturber, so I had to move it away.
A couple of interesting things to note:
Within the limits of the boards, changing the distance between them does change the measured "energy" value of the strike. Farther away = lees energy.
The Emulator board doesn't seem to be detected by my old SkyScan lighting detector. Out of dozens of different tries, nothing.
My Boltek won't detect it when standing directly under the Boltek antenna 25' down. No surprise there I suppose. I have a spare Boltek antenna that I'll test with when I find it.
I haven't played much with the USB connection and PC software yet. More on that later.
The demo board does a good job of showing basic operation of the chip. However, according to the spec sheet, there's a lot more to the chip's abilities to explore.
One other little thing.... Buying the demo kit is the only way to get the assembled Emulator board. However, the USB drive contains all of the Gerber files and parts BOM to build your own.
Oh, and we did have a little lightning in the area a couple of weeks ago (a rarity at any time here in Central California) and the detector board did detect it.
