tesla

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Tesla — the lightning and sferic receiver

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Design-stage concept — nothing built. The figures are verified against the parts' sheets and the parts before a board is made.

Tesla is the station's lightning receiver: NodBus type 7, a NOD. Three ferrite rods, a differential front end, a four-channel ΔΣ converter at 2²⁰ SPS and the STM32H7A3 that runs the detection share one board in one sealed plastic box, the rods inside it. Named for Nikola Tesla.

What it measures — every impulse in 5 kHz – 512 kHz, and for each one:

• the time, by constant-fraction discrimination on the rising edge, to ±0,48 µs on the network's clock — what lets the network locate a stroke by time of arrival;
• the signed amplitude, logarithmic, in a field of 128 dB at 0,016 dB a step — room for the receiver's 98 dB, from a ~9 pT floor to a ~690 nT clip;
• the class — lightning, power-line arcing, or unknown — decided on the node, because only the node has the raw stream and the mains phase under it;
• where the supplement NOD is armed, four more bytes: a raw azimuth, the rise time and two between-band delays that range the source.

A persistent source — an arcing insulator, a tracking line — ships as a state, four records a second, and the running noise floor ships once a second. The node thinks where only it can and stays dumb where the network is better: polarity, stroke grouping and position are the server's.

What one node sees. It detects; it does not locate — position is TOA across stations. A stroke inside ~3–4 km clips the rods: that blind circle is given away by design, because the network sees what the nearest station cannot. An arc has no blind circle at any distance a station may stand, and its reach is set by the site's QRN.

How it hangs on the station

Tesla is alone on its own Bifrost spur — point-to-point, full duplex, the unit end of the run. It carries no line part: a power board for its feed and a communication board for its medium plug into its sockets, and the run — copper or glass, 48 V or 300 V — changes nothing on its own board. The clock is Kronos's, on the spur's clock pair; the board locks its core, the converter's clock and every sample to it. It takes one NOD, two or three — events, source states, supplement — on the same spur.

The board carries a second unit. Flashed with its other image it is Pip, NodBus type 12 — the longwave carriers and the station's longwave time, served on the board's second data body, TIME OUT, which Tesla's image leaves idle (pip/). And a third: under its line-fault image it is Steinmetz, NodBus type 13 — the mains-locked sources of a power line, from a vehicle or a site, the front 20 dB down on the attenuation terminals (steinmetz/).

   3 ferrite rods ──▶ 3× S1/S2 THS4551 ──▶ ADS127L14, 2²⁰ SPS ──SAI──▶ ┌─────────────────────────┐ ── NodBus spur, type 7 ──▶ BIFROST
   REF6041 4,096 V ────────────────────────▶ REFP                      │ TESLA — STM32H7A3       │    (Pip's image: type 12,
   4 NTCs on the H7A3's ADC                                            │ filterbank · detector · │     and TIME OUT to Kronos)
   one IP68 plastic box; the Galvani sockets and the 12 V at its edge  │ CFD · classifier        │
                                                                       └─────────────────────────┘

The tree

tesla/          Tesla — lightning and sferics; one board, three images            NodBus 7
├── design/     the rod worksheet, rod_calc.py; rod_field.py, its solve; chain.py, the clip and the floor
├── pip/        Pip — the longwave carriers: the SID channel, and time            NodBus 12
└── steinmetz/  Steinmetz — line faults on power lines, from a vehicle or a site  NodBus 13

Files

file	contents
HARDWARE.md	the board — the chain with its values, the converter, the clock, the rails, the thermometers, the processor's pins, the sockets, the parts
DETECTION.md	timing by CFD, the filterbank, the strips, the three classes and the mains lock, a grid-only build, the TGF correlation
BUS.md	the backward offset, the 4 B event record, the supplement NOD, the rule for what goes on the wire, one to three NODs
FIRMWARE.md	the firmware, described — boot, states, the bus, time, the always-on path, emission, registers, faults
CONSTRUCTION.md	the frustum and the one plastic box, the rods and how to choose them, the winding, the rod thermometers
WHY.md	the graveyard — rejected alternatives and superseded states
pip/	Pip — the same board under its other image
steinmetz/	Steinmetz — the same board under its line-fault image
design/	the rod worksheet — a calculator for a rod you can buy: permeability, inductance, sensitivity and noise floor

Licence

Hardware: CERN-OHL-P v2 (../LICENSE-HW) · Software: MIT (../LICENSE) — Copyright (c) 2026 NIC — Native Intellect Community