Welcome to our senior project website. Our names are Brian Puccio, Claude Lund, and Charles McBride.
Our Project: We are designing and implementing a lightning detection and warning system. There are four major parts of our system.
1) An EMF detector
2) A light detector
3) An Arduino
4) Our website.
How it works: During a lightning event, the arc of lightning emits an EM field in both the visible spectrum and medium to high frequency. Our EM detection system will be composed of two major parts, an antenna and an amplification circuit. The detector will be tuned to this medium to high frequency, in our case we will be tuning to the frequencies from 285 kHz to 315 kHz. Once our antenna picks up a signal our circuit will then process that signal to be readable by our Arduino. A similar system will be employed for the light detector. Both signals are then passed to our Arduino. Each of these signal serve as a confirmation of lightning. The EM detector will give a longer range to detect lightning, and the light detector will confirm lightning is in the immediate area. The Arduino then sends a time stamp and GPS location of its self to our website to display.