Lightning 2000 example file

WD has an option to use lightning data from the Lightning 2000 software. Does anyone has an example file from the Lightning 2000 ? I’d like to adapt the output from my lightning detector to the file format from Lightning 2000.
Many thanks.

Which lightning detector do you have?

I bought a little board from playingwithfusion on eBay and connected it to RPi. I’d like that WD keeps lightning strikes’ records instead of having data in text files.

One of these AS3935 boards?

Yes. I wrote about it in the other thread.

WD will be expecting a line of data in the file
like
strokes per minute

A late update to this. I’ve tested and I confirm WD reads the file. I just need info from Brian how often does WD access the file - so I need to know how often I need to refresh the file content. I must adjust the python script which updates the file. Thanks!

every second

Thank you Brian. Shall I update the file every second then? So it keeps the last strikes in a rolling minute?

total strikes in a minute and then also last strike (time etc)

I’ve set it up now. We might get some lightning in the next days. I’ll report back how it works. Thanks.

We’re having major thunderstorms around and my detector reports hundreds of lightning strikes.
The RPi logs every stroke in the log file. Today there were about 450. But the WD only reports 214.

Are there any other fields that need to be populated in the nowcast.txt file? Or do I need to adjust the update frequency?
I log a file every 60 seconds (python script in RPi), WD downloads this file from RPi (web server).

It’s not a major issue but if it worked I could write down nice how-to how to integrate own lightning detector with WD. Hobby boards is not available anymore so one alternative would be welcome.

do you mean you use the http download in WD to get the file?

Yes, correct.

Lightning detector → RPi (here the web server runs) ← WD http download every 1 minute

RPi:

  1. Logs every strike to a file
  2. Another python script analyzes the file and generates nowcast.txt and writes the number of strokes in the last current minute. Sleeps for 60 seconds and again it goes.

am I able to download that here to test same setup?

I’ll email you.

Follow up: I’ve worked on a nowcast.txt file format and now it looks better. I added fields like ‘last 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes etc.’. I need few more thunderstorms to say if it is OK or not.