Over the years, I have had more than my fair share of computer equipment destroyed by lightning. Even with good surge suppressors, I still seem to loose parts of computers.<\/p>\n
Do I live in Florida where they get daily lightning storms? No. I have lived in New York and New Hampshire where wee see perhaps a dozen storms a year. Chalk it up to bad luck.<\/p>\n
But perhaps I could spare some of the problems if the storms passed with all my computers shut off. I know that NOTHING will prevent a direct strike. Not even completely unplugged computers. But you can reduce the risk if your computer is at least shutdown and preferably unplugged from power and internet.<\/p>\n
But storms often pass through during the day when I am at work unable to attend to their needs. Now my wife works from home and could help out, but in her studio in the basement, she often only hears a storm when they are right on top of her.<\/p>\n
And hence the desire for a lightning detector. Something that could warn my wife of impending storms so she can shutdown her computerized sewing machine, and something that could at least turn off our computers.<\/p>\n
The initial spark came from an article in Nuts And Volts magazine many years ago. When I decided to build a detector, I could no longer find the article. So, I went to the web in search of a design. I found several circuits, but none really appealed to me. They required hard to find parts, hard to make RF circuits, or difficult to interface a microprocessor to.<\/p>\n
So I started from scratch with the basic information I could remember from the article: 50 turns of wire around a 1 foot circular form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the years, I have had more than my fair share of computer equipment destroyed by lightning. Even with good surge suppressors, I still seem to loose parts of computers. Do I live in Florida where they get daily lightning … Continue reading