Lightning Acquisition and Processing On Sensor Node Using NI cRIO

In this paper, we propose a digital design implementation for continuous real time data acquisition in case of a lightning event. The proposed system is capable of acquiring the lightning data at the rate of 1 MS/s on the FPGA. The system is also capable of providing very accurate timestamps in microsecond’s resolution. The data logging is carried out continuously on the PC using the TDMS file format with each and every sample being timestamped. The entire acquisition design is being implemented using NI cRIO hardware. The components of this assembly consist of the cRIO-9030 chassis , which contains a Kintex-7 FPGA , NI 9223 which is a sixteen bit ADC module, along with the NI 9467 which is a GPS module with the receiver antenna, it is used for accurate timestamping. The analog front end has been already developed, it comprises of an anti aliasing filter ,Low Noise Amplifiers and level shifters which can provide the signal with necessary gain to be processed by the digital section. The output of the analog front end is then fed to the NI 9223 four channel ADC module for sampling at 1MS/s. The samples along with their respective timestamps would be processed for identifying probable lightning data chunks on a preliminary basis which would then be transmitted over an Ethernet interface to the Central Processing system using Network Streams. The proposed digital design implementation for the entire acquisition system on the FPGA is briefly discussed in this paper.