Wednesday 24 June 2009

Debate to action climate change event

Today we took the wind turbine to the debate to action event on climate change at city hall Cardiff. We made an interactive exhibit using the wind turbine generator with a crank handle to power 5 halogen lights a radio, a bubble machine and a motor. A feat that saw us up until 3 the night before soldering away in Suneils garage.

The halogen lights were turned on and off sequentially at different voltages programmed by an Arduino. Essentially a modification of the dump load controller using an Arduino to control the switching voltages instead of the opamps. We've given it the name Adaptive Load/Energy Controller:


Here's a video of the setup in action:

Adaptive load controller from Trystan Lea on Vimeo.

The exibit seemed to be a great sucess both because the technical side came together in time and worked! and because the kids seemed pretty interested in it and got involved and so it was a great day!


Now that we have the adaptive load controller built it can be used for testing the DC current sensing circuit and can be used with the turbine erected.

9 comments:

Dan Bates said...

that video is hilarious! brill to see it all working :-)

You Took That Well said...

That video just blew my geeky little mind. Bravo.

Trystan Lea said...

Great!

Wind Power said...

This is great that these brilliant minded people worked together to utilize the wind power efficiently. It was pleasure reading this post.

peter donegan said...

absolutely love this ;) really very well done.... love the bubbles, lights and of course the music!!

peter

El Bilson said...

Great video - I've been looking to setup something similar to this. Thanks!

OneToRemember said...

Let’s not forget that you need a lot of wind to get any worthwhile energy out of a DIY generator. It is always difficult to know how good the plan is that you may buy – price is not always a good indicator…
The best thing is to get hold of a few plans – maybe free ones – and then start to think about what type of generator you want to build. Maybe a simple Vertical Axis model first and then you can always build a higher efficiency model. In my view build simple first and get some power then develop and build more.. Here is a link to a site with lots of plans available some are free so worth downloading just to see th scope of a project.


http://www.onetoremember.co.uk/xcart/wind.html

plumbing said...

The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of carbon dioxide.

party bags said...

Exploring things on your own is really fun. It's a big achievement if have a successful exploration.