Wind Power for the Pi/Arduino – 8 Days in the Breeze

October 23, 2014 Arduino, Arduino Software, Project Curacao, Real Time Clocks, Solar Power, SwitchDoc Dual WatchDog Timer, WeatherPiArduino, Wind Power
WeatherArduino
WeatherPiArduino and WeatherRack in Place on Tower

Wind Power for the Pi/Arduino – 8 Days in the Breeze

A new 50W wind turbine, wind speed and direction units have been added to Project

WeatherArduino
WeatherArduino and WeatherRack in Place on Tower

Curacao during the upgrade earlier this month.   Project Curacao has now been down in the Caribbean for 7 months.  Everything is looking good.  We replaced the wind turbine,  added a cable to keep it from popping out, stiffened the mount and added wind speed, direction and rain measurement to Project Curacao.

I put in the WeatherPiArduino board to interface between the WeatherRack (what a great name for the weather sensors!) and the Battery Watchdog Arduino.  We also replaced the DS1307 with a DS3231 Real Time Clock.  The DS1307 has been problematic for months as shown here.  A benchmark comparison of Real Time Clocks is here.  I also added some additional solar panels.

Solar Power
New Solar Panels on Top of the Project Curacao Box – WeatherRack in Background

 

I also dramatically improved the reliability of the Battery WatchDog Arduino by adding a hardware WatchDog Timer – which has now been released as a product.  With the previous system, the Arduino could not recover from a power outage (the box is solar powered, and if you had enough cloudy days, it would die – requiring a hard reset from a button).  I’ve had a low power event after deployment and the WatchDog turned the Arduino back on perfectly!

DS3231
WatchDog Board and WeatherPiArduino board with the DS3231 RTC (right and upside down)

I use RasPiConnect to build this control panel to show the wind speed / gust and performance of the Wind Power subsystem.  This is just a first cut at a good graph.  You can see the wind is greater at night and it varies a good deal.  One nice thing about Project Curacao and RasPiConnect is that it can be updated remotely.  If you want to build your own control panels with RasPiConnect, I wrote a tutorial here and a software library for LIVE graphs here.

Wind Power
8 Days in the Wind – RasPiConnect Control Panel

 

What Happened in the Great Wind Storm of March 2014?

Wind Power
The Great Wind Storm of March 2014 – Results

After the great Wind Storm of March 2014 in Curacao (which really wasn’t that much of a wind storm – 35 MPH, it popped the turbine out of the tube and then the turbine destroyed itself completely), we decided that we had to make the improvements to have a longer lasting wind power turbine.  It only lasted one week in March 2014 after I left.  Now it has been up for two weeks and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  Note that the turbine popped out of the stand and throughly destroyed itself.  We think that is was a sympathetic vibration with a particular wind speed (much like the “Galloping Gertie” Tacoma Narrows bridge) since we observed that the stand was flexing in the wind.

3 Comments

    • Node-Red is a pretty cool thing. I will look at adding it to my next article on iBeacons that I am doing for Raspberry Pi Geek Magazine. Thanks for calling that up.

      I want to correct one thing you said, however. RasPiConnect is much more than a dashboard. It has buttons, sliders, toggles, touch devices and all sorts of interactive controls. It is a light weight control panel (light weight meaning to the Arduino / Pi) that runs on an iPhone/iPad. Check this link out to see all 5 screens for Project Curacao. https://www.switchdoc.com/raspiconnect/

      I’ve had pretty bad luck with the internal hardware Raspberry Pi, which is why I gave up and use an external hardware watchdog.

      • Sorry about that… I completely misjudged RasPiConnect by looking at the picture here (even missed the buttons!) :S Thanks for clarifying that.

        Great blog post by the way! And the rest of your site!

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