Positron BASIC Community

Out of curiosity I thought I'd have a play with this -

https://www.mikroe.com/thunder-click"]https://www.mikroe.com/thunder-click

Has anyone used one? There are other versions available all using the AS3935 chip

https://download.mikroe.com/documents/datasheets/AS3935-Data-Sheet.pdf

Another version -

https://wiki.dfrobot.com/sen0290

An interesting chip, but the same, essentially, can be done with a single transistor Long Wave TRF radio. Or better still, an old ZN414 chip (Now named a TA7642). :-)

Lightning always interfered with the radios I used to build as a boy, and most passing cars in the street. i.e. MW and LW and VLF (to listen to the planets). In TRF, regen, and super-regen.

I once made a MW superhet from scratch, but I could not quite get the oscillator to match up with the mixer front-end, to give the IF correctly, so I eventually scrapped it. Although I only had dad's AVO meter at the time, and no such things as a scope or signal generator etc... But since I was only around 12 years old, we couldn't afford things like that.

Regards
Les

I must have been six or seven when my interest in "things with wires" started stirring. My Dad's brother Bob worked in a telephone exchange and he brought me lots of wires and cables. My first "machine" consisted of a large cardboard box stuffed full of wires in all sorts of parallel/series combinations. I brought one cable out and fitted a 15 amp plug on it (round pins, Les will remember those).

I plugged it in and switched on. Nothing happened until my grandma touched one of the wires and got a nasty belt. Boy was I in trouble....

My projects have all gone in a similar direction since!

Charlie

Good one Charlie. :-)

Yes, I remember those plugs. They were still in the older houses in the 1980s, in the North East, when I used to go repairing TVs and videos etc, in people's houses.

If I remember... They didn't have a fuse inside them, it was just the main fuse in the consumer unit, and most people used to plug multiple things in them, and in the bayonet light sockets. Some were just waiting to go pop, or cause a fire with their wire overheating! Because ring mains wiring was not used when these sockets were put into houses, so spurs of wiring could get very hot.

I used to enjoy working with mains power as well when I was a young-un Charlie, but especially higher voltages using an isolation 500V transformer and the long brown, high-voltage rectifiers that were used in televisions in the 1960s. Along with the high voltage capacitors, and triple or quadruple the voltage so I could feed a 3" CRT, or the light intensifier tube that dad had. And if I had EHT, such as 12KV to 26KV, it was so much fun to see the half inch spark, and smell the ozone. :-)

Since I lost my sense of smell, there are important smells I would give anything to have back, and a few of them are solder flux, ozone, and the smell of a PCB board with components on it when just opened. I grew up with those smells, and I never realised how important smells are. :-(

Regards
Les