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Your cart is empty.The SparkFun Lightning Detector adds lightning detection to your next weather station to make sure you are aware of any potential hazardous weather heading your way. The AS3935 is capable of detecting lightning up to 40km away with an accuracy of 1km to the storm front with a sensitive antenna tuned to pick up lightning events in the 500kHz band.
There are a number of sources that can cause false positives but the lightning detector itself can reliably filter these out by default. If not, we've made sure to include settings you can configure using the lightning detector library to increase the chip's robustness to noise and false positives. The lightning detector library also gives you access to settings such as storm sensing sensitivity when detecting indoors vs outdoors, or the number of lightning strikes needed to trigger an interrupt.
Lightning Sensing
40km Range with accuracy of 1km in 14 steps
Features
Programmable Detection Levels
Distance to storm estimation
"Disturber" (false event) rejection algorithm
Indoor and Outdoor Settings
SPI Interface
Operating Range
Supply Voltage: 2.4V - 5.5V
Tom Gee
2025-08-14 10:48:59
This thing has a tunable 500khz radio and a signal processor to monitor the radio looking for lightning signatures. The radio needs tuning before it can be used!!! Sparkfun has 3 sets of example software in their driver but you really need something better to tie all the examples together. I found some excellent software on github that tunes the radio and adaptively sets the noise floor of the receiver. When a lightning storm approached I noticed I started to get lightning notifications from this device but the strikes were 20 km away and barely rumbling in the sky. As the storm approached, my detector reported lightning 10 km away. At this time I heard the lighting alarm go off on the golf course we live on which was pretty cool to detect the lightning strikes in advance of the professional system. I watched the storm come and go via MQTT packets on my WiFi from the attached CPU. Besides good software, the device needs to be a minimum of 10 cm away from Wifi antennas which is why I have it mounted on the other end of a 6 inch long perf board away from the ESP8266 CPU. The perfboard of course then needs to be kept away from noise sources like monitors, computers, printers, etc. I'm using the SPI interface of the ESP8266 as recommended by Sparkfun.
Cecil Clontz
2025-06-11 15:38:56
I've spent close to a month working with this sensor using ESP8266, Uno and ESP32. I've tried all possible libraries, SPI pin combinations and I've finally given up. I managed to get it running on "kaminari" code but sometimes the lightning is right on top of you and it does not detect it and other times there is no lightning for 100 miles in any direction and it goes off every 20 seconds. It's just too erratic to be of any use.
Alex Gonzalez
2025-04-07 14:34:15
Took a week longer to receive and on top of that, item is inaccurate and erratic. Is nothing near being experimental or even a good toy.
telephone man
2025-02-05 14:52:12
the promise was grand, but the delivery was pitiful. using the sparkfun libraries and sketches, barely worked at all. thunderstorms all around, could see lightning, hear thunder. this unit might display 'disturber', and once or twice did show 'lightning detected'.most of us do not have a logic analyzer to tune the antenna.i'll see if i can find better info, or better library, but before the time runs out, i think i will return this board.
DrTechdom
2024-12-23 10:53:18
This unit is sitting in an ESP32 with a lightning storm overhead as I type this using SPI. There is no report from it of a storm but my JESSINIE AS3935 is detecting just fine.
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