I recently purchased a MOD-1016 chip for lightning detection in order to improve my weather station. The chip is based on the AS3935 chip (from the Austrian AMS company yay!) and ships as a complete I2C-ready breakout module from embedded adventures.

First steps

I skip the following parts because I consider them trivial:

Soldering
Wiring to a Arduino Nano

The wiring part is actually the most tricky part, I will provide the schematics once I have a running system. For now I focus on getting the system online. The wiring on the following picture is accurate:

Wiring of the MOD-1016 to the Arduino Nano

I put everything together in a nice box to protect the electronics from the environment. In the end it will end up outdoors in my garden.
The box is IP55 compliant, so when deployed for real I will put it in additional plastic bag to avoid any issues that comes from rain. For the first experiments IP55 is fine. And this is how it looks like

Wired box, open

A small reader program is in my meteo repository (in the Lightning directory) on GitHub, and I let it run for 1.5 days.
I had some problems with the serial port on high baud rates, so i configured it for 9600 baud. The serial connection over this period was fine, but it seems that the location has too much interference.
All I got was constant “DISTURBER DETECTED”

Console output with lots of “DISTURBER DETECTED”

Looks like I need some fine-tuning. I disconnected the device and will run some tests with my laptop on the go.

For now I have a running serial connection, the chip delivers some output, so I’m expecting that with some fine-tuning I should get this thingy running soon.