Mon bloc-notes

Yesterday, we got a thunderstorm. Usually, when people are on vacation, they prefer a nice weather. This is not the case for us . We took the car, and drove to a place a few kilometers southwest of Ancelle, the small village where we are staying for a week, in south of french Alps.

Our flash detector triggered several times, but we got only two pictures. Only one displays a flash. The other one was triggered by a distant intra-cloud lightning, and it's hardly visible on the picture. Other detections came from flashes in our back (yes!) or on our sides. Conclusion: I'm happy with sensitivity of this version of the trigger .

Today, with my youngest son, we were able to test in real conditions the new version of the lightning shutter trigger, thanks to a thunderstorm which appeared in the beginning of the afternoon.

The idea was not to spend time on picture quality, but just to check trigger sensitivity. And the results are good: every lightning flash was detected, even two ones that happened in our back and one that we did not see! Additionally, I realized that there is no need for an opamp in the circuit: for every picture, the trigger sets itself in non amplified mode (I implemented an automatic switch between amplified and non amplified mode).