more as3935 lightning detector issues, more of a puzzle.

Sensors Environmental
1

I have my lightning detector up and running. I wired it up to an Adafruit Itsy Bitsy nRF52840, on a solderless protoboard, using the sparkfun_qwiicas3935 library.

The ‘simpletest’, example1_basic_lightning_spi, and example2_more_lightning_features" all work. The signals on the itsy board can have lots of ‘disturbers’ and the threshold values change accordingly in example1.

The trouble is that when I integrate it into my larger project on a permanent protoboard (soldered headers and soldered wiring), the programs mentioned all run, but there is no response to noise or disturbers. When I discharge a pizeo lighter near the lightning detector on teh itsy board, the disturbers are detected, when on the permanent board connected to my RPi PICO, the programs run but there is no disturbers detected. Okay, so maybe it is too close to components on the board. I remove the lightning detector from the header, plug it into a solderless breadboard and use long jumper wires to connect to the soldered header on the perma-proto. Still no detections of disturbers or noise, and the programs run.

I have checked and re-checked and re-rechecked the wiring and it appears to be good. The question is, will the simple test and other programs run without errors and still not be wired up correctly?

The non-lightning programs run on the PICO with teh lightning board installed and wired up, throw no errors, so the PICO is working as I expect.

Truly puzzling to me. The interrupt is wired and identified in the program so, boy is this got me puzzled, any suggestions out there?

Roger

2

Well, if anyone is interested…

I rerouted the interrupt to a different pin where the wiring wasn’t so crowded and now I am reading interrupts.

The next issue was how to reduce the noise and disruptors.

Turns out my LED magnifier was throwing a LOT of noise, solved that…

Next, when installed on my mainboard, there are still noise and disrupter events. I (finally!) realized that the ‘noise’ is from the environment, not the gpio wires etc. I removed the sparkfun board to an outboard protoboard, and adhered this board to a location in the project enclosure (weather proof electrical box about 10x12x5 a nches, lots of room) and used 6" long jumpers. Now the board is just throwing occasional noise events, and using a noise threshold of 3 has removed them.

So, now, the issue is how to integrate this with the rest of the project software, as the program needs to react to interrupts to catch them, but not interfere with all the other goings on.

Roger