Fancy Homemade Trigger Designed to Capture Lightning

IT consultant and photo enthusiast Viktor Takacs didn’t have much success when he tried capturing lightning on camera, so he decided to build this fancy do-it-yourself trigger (which he named “Zeus”) that automatically snaps a photo whenever the photodiode detects a flash of lightning. He even built a knob into the device that can be used to adjust sensitivity. The demo above shows the trigger reacting to manually triggered flashes from a strobe.

Takacs has a detailed post that walks through how he created the device. You can also email him for the code used by the microcontroller.