With the winning of the business competition in Rwanda, the building of the lightning detector becomes a serious pursuit. We decided on the following selection criteria for the materials, basically based on the idea that we are not professional PCB designers:

- Avoid surface mount (perhaps a next version?)

- Use pre-built modules for the RF components: AS3935 lightning detector and GPS module. There are well designed pcb's on the market that would be hard to beat.

We will build the PCB to house power supply and CPU and allows for solid mounting or connecting the GPS and AS3935 boards. The power supply will be solar panel based. Most of the time, the module will be asleep, during which about 70 muA is used. Once lightning is detected, the AS#(#% will produce an interrupt to wake up the ystem during which the system needs about 50 mA. We assume thunder storms will not last more than 24 hours, in which case the batteries chosen here should work.

With these consideration, these are the materials chosen:

Next step the PCB design.