I have a weather station at the cabin. It is a pretty standard one measuring wind direction, wind speed, humidity, temperature and precipitation.

But we need more sensors! After reading this blog about lightning detectors and Raspberry Pi, I ordered one pretty quickly 🙂

After some soldering and adjustmens to the Raspberry Pi casing, this is how it looks:

When detecting a lightning it reports the distance in kilometers. It can report a distance between 1 and 40 km.

It logs to a file for now and the scripts is started by an init script after boot. As it is winter now, I don’t expect any data for a while. I just tested with some sparks from a battery and it warned about noise. Now I have to wait for the thunder season. When I have real data, I will create a script to insert it into the database with the other weather data, and perhaps create some alerts with email when a thunderstorm is approaching. In any case it is cool with weather statistics 🙂