Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

remote accessible wind speed/direction for RC soaring pilots

Status
Not open for further replies.

nm5s

New Member
I'm looking for ideas to put together a cheap way to get wind speed and direction information from a ridge top to me and other located miles away.
Any ideas you can throw my way?

thanks and 73s
nm5s
 
Are you starting this project from scratch or you already have built up the measuring equipment and u just want to transfer the data from long distance to your place?
If this is the case and distance between your place and remote location is withing 1200 meters use RS485 communication network and if distance is more than this you can use TCP/IP. In this your system will be connected to the internet all the time and will have a unique IP address. Whenever required, you can view the parameters.

Regarding measurement of wind velocity, you can use a dynamo and windmill and calibrate the output of dynamo in terms of wind velocity. i.e. higher the wind velocity, higher will be the dynamo voltage and vice versa. So dynamo output will be directly proportional to the wind velocity. This output can be easily converted into digital form using ADCs.

Direction can be measured using magnetic switches. Attach a magnet to the direction indicator (the arrow like thing). Now put for magnetic reed switches in the four directions at the bottom of this arrow. The switch on which the magnet will come will get activated and will indacte that particular direction. Note that more switches will give accurate reading of the direction.

P.S : THe methods I have suggested may be crude and newer effecient methods may have been found out. After all this is just an idea :idea: how to proceed with your project.

Kinjal
 
Thanks for that quick reply.

This will be from scratch. No parts of this are figured out or built yet. The wind site is without power, so it will need to be solar. Brainstorming thoughts include possible radio beacon or a tone controlled beacon using FRS band or maybe the 2M ham band. I want to avoid an on-site computer and just generally want the simplest solution.
 
Bog standard RC?

Brainstorming away...

For the radio link; as you only want a couple of vaiables relaying, how about taking the RC idea of pulse width modulation and transmitting the signals on a (basically) audio carrier?
You mention something like the 2m band so the miles are no problem with this idea, some sort of encoder could just plug into the microphone socket of an off-the-shelf hand-held.

For wind speed and direction; can you find a cheap domestic gizmo ready-made (maybe RadioShack do something?), cannibalise, rather than re-invent?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top