A Collection Of Lightning Detectors

July 15, 2025 by 20 Comments

You would think detecting lightning would be easy. Each lightning bolt has a staggering amount of power, and, clearly, you can hear the results on any radio. But it is possible to optimize a simple receiver circuit to specifically pick up lightning. That’s exactly what [Wenzeltech] shows in a page with several types of lightning detectors complete with photos and schematics.

Just as with a regular radio, there are multiple ways to get the desired result. The first circuits use transistors. Later versions move on to op amps and even have “storm intensity” meters. The final project uses an ion chamber from a smoke detector. It has the benefit of being very simple, but you know, also slightly radioactive.

You might think you could detect lightning by simply looking out the window. While that’s true, you can, in theory, detect events from far away and also record them easily using any data acquisition system on a PC, scope, or even logic analyzer.

Why? We are sure there’s a good reason, but we’ve never needed one before. These designs look practical and fun to build, and that’s good enough for us.

You can spruce up the output easily. You can also get it all these days, of course, on a chip.

Cranking Up The Detail In A Flight Simulator From 1992

December 5, 2024 by 22 Comments

Nostalgia is a funny thing. If you experienced the early days of video games in the 1980s and 90s, there’s a good chance you remember those games looking a whole lot better than they actually did. But in reality, the difference between 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom and the original Legend of Zelda is so vast that it can be hard to reconcile the fact that they’re both in the same medium. Of course, that doesn’t mean change the way playing those old games actually makes you feel. If only there was some way to wave a magic wand and improve the graphics of those old titles…

Well, if you consider Ghidra and a hex editor to be magic wands in our community, making that wish come true might be more realistic than you think. As [Alberto Marnetto] explains in a recent blog post, decompiling Stunt Island and poking around at the code allows one to improve the graphical detail level in the flight simulator by approximately 800%. In fact, it’s possible to go even higher, though at some point the game simply becomes unplayable.

Continue reading “Cranking Up The Detail In A Flight Simulator From 1992” →

Boss Byproducts: Fulgurites Are Fossilized Lightning

October 29, 2024 by 28 Comments

So far in this series, we’ve talked about man-made byproducts — Fordite, which is built-up layers of cured car enamel, and Trinitite, which was created during the first nuclear bomb test.

A fulgurite pendant.
A lovely fulgurite pendant. Image via Etsy

But not all byproducts are man-made, and not all of them are basically untouchable. Some are created by Mother Nature, but are nonetheless dangerous. I’m talking about fulgurites, which can form whenever lightning discharges into the Earth.

It’s likely that even if you’ve seen a fulgurite, you likely had no idea what it was. So what are they, exactly? Basically, they are natural tubes of glass that are formed by a fusion of silica sand or rock during a lightning strike.

Much like Lichtenberg figures appear across wood, the resulting shape mimics the path of the lightning bolt as it discharged into the ground. And yes, people make jewelry out of fulgurites.

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Mechanical Logic Gates With Amplification

September 20, 2024 by 5 Comments

One of the hardest things about studying electricity, and by extension electronics, is that you generally can’t touch or see anything directly, and if you can you’re generally having a pretty bad day. For teaching something that’s almost always invisible, educators have come up with a number of analogies for helping students understand the inner workings of this mysterious phenomenon like the water analogy or mechanical analogs to electronic circuits. One of [Thomas]’s problems with most of these devices, though, is that they don’t have any amplification or “fan-out” capability like a real electronic circuit would. He’s solved that with a unique mechanical amplifier.

Digital logic circuits generally have input power and ground connections in addition to their logic connection points, so [Thomas]’s main breakthrough here is that the mechanical equivalent should as well. His uses a motor driving a shaft with a set of pulleys, each of which has a fixed string wrapped around the pulley. That string is attached to a second string which is controlled by an input. When the input is moved the string on the pulley moves as well but the pulley adds a considerable amount of power to to the output which can eventually be used to drive a much larger number of inputs. In electronics, the ability to drive a certain number of inputs from a single output is called “fan-out” and this device has an equivalent fan-out of around 10, meaning each output can drive ten inputs.

[Thomas] calls his invention capstan lever logic, presumably named after a type of winch used on sailing vessels. In this case, the capstan is the driven pulley system. The linked video shows him creating a number of equivalent circuits starting with an inverter and working his way up to a half adder and an RS flip-flop. While the amplifier pulley does take a minute to wrap one’s mind around, it really helps make the equivalent electronic circuit more intuitive. We’ve seen similar builds before as well which use pulleys to demonstrate electronic circuits, but in a slightly different manner than this build does.

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Responsive LCD Backlights With A Little Lateral Thinking

July 3, 2024 by 23 Comments

LCD televisions are a technological miracle, but if they have an annoying side it’s that some of them are a bit lacklustre when it comes to displaying black. [Mousa] has a solution, involving a small LCD and a bit of lateral thinking.

These screens work by the LCD panel being placed in front of a bright backlight, and only letting light through at bright parts of the picture. Since LCD isn’t a perfect attenuator, some of the light can make its way through, resulting in those less than perfect blacks. More recent screens replace the bright white backlight with an array of LEDs that light up with the image, but the electronics to make that happen are not exactly trivial.

The solution? Find a small LCD panel and feed it from the same HDMI source as a big panel. Then place an array of LDRs on the front of the small LCD, driving an array of white LEDs through transistor drivers to make a new responsive backlight. We’re not sure we’d go to all this trouble, but it certainly looks quite cool as you can see below the break.

This may be the first responsive backlight we’ve brought you, but more than one Ambilight clone has graced these pages.

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Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring

April 15, 2024 by 8 Comments

Last time, we looked into using a logic analyzer to decode SPI signals of LCD displays, which can help us reuse LCD screens from proprietary systems, or port LCD driver code from one platform to another! If you are to do that, however, you might find a bottleneck – typically, you need to capture a whole bunch of data and then go through it, comparing bytes one by one, which is quite slow. If you have tinkered with Pulseview, you probably have already found an option to export decoded data – all you need to do is right-click on the decoder output and you’ll be presented with a bunch of options to export it. Here’s what you will find:

2521888-2521888 I²C: Address/data: Start
2521896-2521947 I²C: Address/data: Address write: 22
2521947-2521954 I²C: Address/data: Write
2521955-2521962 I²C: Address/data: ACK
2521962-2522020 I²C: Address/data: Data write: 01
2522021-2522028 I²C: Address/data: ACK
2522030-2522030 I²C: Address/data: Start repeat
2522038-2522089 I²C: Address/data: Address read: 22
2522089-2522096 I²C: Address/data: Read
2522096-2522103 I²C: Address/data: ACK
2522104-2522162 I²C: Address/data: Data read: 91
2522162-2522169 I²C: Address/data: NACK
2522172-2522172 I²C: Address/data: Stop

Whether on the screen or in an exported file, the decoder output is not terribly readable – depending on the kind of interface you’re sniffing, be it I2C, UART or SPI, you will get five to ten lines of decoder output for every byte transferred. If you’re getting large amounts of data from your logic analyzer and you want to actually understand what’s happening, this quickly will become a problem – not to mention that scrolling through the Pulseview window is not a comfortable experience.

The above output could look like this: 0x22: read 0x01 ( DEV_ID) = 0x91 (0b10010001). Yet, it doesn’t, and I want to show you how to correct this injustice. Today, we supercharge Pulseview with a few external scripts, and I’ll show you how to transfer large amounts of Sigrok decoder output data into beautiful human-readable transaction printouts. While we’re at it, let’s also check out commandline sigrok, avoiding the Pulseview UI altogether – with sigrok-cli, you can easily create a lightweight program that runs in the background and saves all captured data into a text file, or shows it on a screen in realtime! Continue reading “Logic Analyzers: Decoding And Monitoring” →

Modern Microcontroller Boosts Classic Logic Analyzer To New Heights

March 19, 2024 by 5 Comments

[Ted Fried] recently found a beautiful HP 1600A/1607A logic analyzer set. State of the art in 1975, it looks like glorious Space Age equipment today. He decided to hook it up some modern gear to put it through its paces.

Wanting to give the equipment a proper shakedown, he enlisted a Teensy 4.1 to spit a deluge of logic at the HP unit. The microcontroller was tasked with generating 32 data signals along with two clock outputs to give the analyzer plenty to analyze. The HP 1600A handled this no problem, so [Ted] kept tinkering.

His next feat was to explore the addressable “MAP” function of the unit, which allowed writing to the 64×64 pixel display. The Teensy 4.1 was easily able to send images to the display, but [Ted] isn’t stopping there. He’s got plans to do the usual thing and get Bad Apple going on the hardware.

Getting a logic analyzer to analyze logic isn’t much of a hack, sure. But it’s instructive of how to approach working with such hardware. If you want to spit a bunch of logic out fast, a Teensy 4.1 is a great choice because it’s got a ton of IO and a ton of clock cycles to tickle it with.

We enjoyed seeing this old piece of hardware light up the phosphors once more. If you’ve got your own projects going on with classic bits of HP test gear, don’t hesitate to let us know!