Gravity: AS3935 IC Lightning Sensor for Distance, Intensity, and Frequency Detection - Thunder Thunderstorm Warning Detector for Weather Station and Photography (Max 40km Range)

These are supposed to ship with a capacitor that results in an RLC frequency with 3.5% of 500 khz to operate correctly. The chip has a calibration procedure to allow you to add up to a 120 pF correction to bring the oscillator within spec, but my board came further out of spec than that and I can only get it within about 6% of 500 khz at the maximum correction. Consequentially the sensor does not work very well, in fact it doesn't really work at all. Which is a shame because it's a nicely made board otherwise.

Wired this up to my Raspberry pi and ran the sample code and got the following error : AS3935 ('init sensor fail',)Checked I had enabled I2C - Yeschecked I2C sudo i2cdetect -y 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f00: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --20: -- -- -- -- -- .........Turns out the I2C address on a raspberry pi now has 0 though 7 restricted. If I run with the -a option sudo i2cdetect -y -a 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f00: -- -- -- 03 -- -- -- --Yep its there , but there is no way to shift the address up to 8 or above. The dip switch only allow 0,1,2 3So the board is unusable.*****Update 10the Nov 2022: I went ahead and eventually after changing the code to ignore the init error I got the device to work. After that I returned the init code and it now responds with.AS3935 ('init sensor sucess.',)My concern is that eventually the Pi folks may actually use what has now become a restricted adddres.Upping the star rating to 3 as I still have this concern.

Perfect

As I’m in the U.K. I sat around for months waiting for a good storm. Well tonight, as I’m writing this, we got one. Lo and behold the sensor doesn’t work all that well. Think I’ll stick to the cheaper weather sensors such as barometric pressure etc which work well and don’t cost what this one does!