Wind Power and the Raspberry Pi /Arduino

As a last minute addition  to Project Curacao (a massive solar and wind powered Raspberry Pi / Arduino project), I added a small 12V 50W (supposedly 50W – see characterization) wind turbine to help out the system.  You can buy this $80 wind turbine on amazon.com here.  I had already figured out that the Pi couldn’t run more than about 14 hours a day and I had built an Arduino battery watchdog to do the power management.  The first thing I had to do was characterize the wind turbine,

because the manufacturer gave no information that I could use to do a design.  I had to figure how the unloaded turbine would behave (approximating the load at about 30 ohms by watching the maximum current I drew when the battery was discharged – your load will vary!!!!!!).  The loaded curve looks like this:

 

 

 

I got this data by putting the turbine on a spade and hanging it out the window while measuring voltage and current in the Project Curacao box. It was during a snow storm.

Installation

After installation, The wind turbine worked as predicted by our models. We switched on the turbine at night to provide a trickle charge to the main computer. We got about 60 – 90ma of current at 15MPH. No where close to the 200-300ma it takes to run the Pi.

Below is our wind control panel(made with RasPiConnect – www.milocreek.com) during a wind storm up north before deployment.