Summary
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Use Raspberry Pi + USB webcam to capture lightning automatically; It is a cheap and effective method
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Grab the Stormwatch-Pi code on GitHub, run it, and watch the flashes in your browser.
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Saves pre/post flash frames and sends them for review – DIY friendly and editable.
Pictures of lightning always look amazing, but ideally, you’re not sitting there with camera in hand ready to press the shutter when the sky lights up. Fortunately, we have access to technology that can register flash and take pictures.
As it turns out, building one of these automatic lightning photographers is a lot easier than you might think. In fact, someone already made something with a Raspberry Pi and a webcam, and it works surprisingly well.
This lightning monitor uses a Raspberry Pi and a USB webcam to do the job
Why not do it at home?
On it The Raspberry Pi subredditGitHub user report315 has featured photos from his newest project, Stormwatch-Pi. Honestly, I could sit here and discuss the photos they took, but I think it’s best if you see the photos for yourself. You can take a look at sheet315’s work in the image gallery above; Some of them are a little off-kilter, but there are some great shots in there. Honestly, even the not-so-great shots are still a fantastic result for a DIY project that uses two cheap pieces of hardware to get the job done.
Setting up the project is very simple. Just grab a Pi (or pretty much anything else you can use that runs the code), plug in the USB webcam, then grab the code. Stormwatch-Pi GitHub repo and manage. You will now have a simple system that you can monitor through your browser to ensure everything is working properly. It will automatically focus on bright flashes and send the previous and next ten frames to a computer for human analysis.
There’s already a subreddit thread on page315 where people have some good tips on how to improve this, but as a quick and easy project you can put together in minutes, it seems to work pretty well.
