The Flash Bee Keeps an Eye on the Skies with Lightning Detection and Tracking Out to Nearly 26 Miles

Maker Gokul KB, also known by the community as "Gokux," has designed what looks at first glance to be a compact handheld radio — but is, in fact, a lightning detector with strength estimation, strike count, and distance estimation capabilities.

"Imagine you’re setting out for a hike on a clear day, with no indication of an approaching thunderstorm. However, by the time you reach the summit of the mountain, the weather changes unexpectedly, leaving you exposed without any warning," the maker writes of the inspiration behind the project. "With Flash Bee, you no longer have to rely on guesswork. You can keep it in your backpack or clip it to your gear, and it will continuously monitor lightning activity in your vicinity. If a storm begins to form nearby, the device detects lightning strikes in real time and indicates their distance from you, providing an early warning before conditions become dangerous."

The Flash Bee itself is built around off-the-shelf hardware: a compact Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 microcontroller board sits at its heart, connected to a circular display and an ams OSRAM AS3935 Franklin lightning sensor — named for Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment, in which a metal key was tied to a kite string and used to capture energy during a lightning storm and redirect it to a nearby Leyden jar.

There's no need for a kite with the Flash Bee, though: an internal lithium-polymer battery, housed in a custom 3D-printed case resembling a handheld radio, keeps the gadget running while the lightning detector does its work. Its distance estimation is claimed to operate to a range of up to 40km (around 25 miles) with 1km accuracy (around 0.6 miles), while the strike detection can handle both cloud-to-ground and ground-to-cloud strikes — keeping count of how many have been detected while also tracking their estimated strength.

The project is documented in full on Instructables, including STL files for the housing and full source code under an unspecified license.