The FRANKLIN: The Finer Replacement to a Nonideal Kite Lightning Influx Node

Team Members
  • Matthew Hartnett
  • Case Chrisbacher
  • Blake Novak
  • Eytan Mizrahi
  • Shangwen (Aileen) Ma
  • Elisabetta Medici

Team Name: Keys on Kites
Sponsor: Al Gasiewski

  Download the Project Poster

Did you know that 40% of all wildfires are caused by lightning strikes, and we still don't have a low cost solution to quickly and accurately track lightning! Additionally, the scientific community knows very little about the electric field emissions of lightning. We're Keys On Kites, and we developed the Finer Replacement to A Non-ideal Kite Lightning Influx Node, as known as the FRANKLIN. The FRANKLIN is a set of three low cost nodes that synchronously sample E-field emissions of lightning strikes. This data is time tagged to 8ns of accuracy, then uploaded to a central server. We then compute a triangulation and publish it to our public server.