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[Robin Gilks]

Thought I'd pop in and say hello as I've just been nudged by the forum!!

Just over a year ago I built and put up a 3m dual rotor axial wind generator on a temporary pump-up mast. Since then the mast has been refined to withstand up to hurricane force winds (all my calculations put it surviving 160km/hr winds) and a controller based on a Linksys wireless router designed, built, coded and just about debugged! The new deep cycle batteries even have a box round them to keep them warm and keep the stock out of the cables:)

A picture record of the build can be found here (http://gilks.ath.cx/gallery/v/Wind/) and I'm just filling in the text here (http://gilks.ath.cx/~g8ecj/Turbine/) of the controller at least - one day I'll detail some of the generator and mast information...just need a bit of time!

[Rob Beckers]

Nice pig Robin!
Oh, and the wind turbine looks good too... :)

Seriously though, very nicely done, and congratulations. How is performance? Could you tell a bit more how you are using a Linksys box as a controller? I'm running HyperWRT on a Linksys (predecessor of OpenWRT), so I get that you are hacking the firmware for other purposes (It's a small version of Linux, right?). Just not sure how this fits into the wind turbine theme.

-RoB-

[Robin Gilks]

The Linksys router is used in two guises - firstly as a measurement tool to monitor what the turbine produces and what goes in and out of the battery bank and secondly to control an inverter and hence a load.

Both interfaces use 1-wire chips, the monitoring is done with a Dallas DS2438 which can measure volts and current. It is a battery monitor chip so as well as provide current measurements it also contains charge counting registers so the running total and overall totals of charge in and out of the batteries can be monitored. This monitored output is sent to my main server machine where is it plotted out using Cacti along with relevant weather (wind speed) information (see this link) (http://gilks.ath.cx/cacti/graph_view.php?action=tree&tree_id=3).

The monitored data is also used internally for the controller function. I'm using my system in an unusual way - rather than charge batteries until I need the power and dumping the excess, I'm charging the batteries until full and then dumping a known amount by running the filter pump on my swimming pool and then restarting the charge cycle.

The inverter that runs the pool pump can be controlled with a remote pushbutton. Its a single pole changeover button with an LED that indicates the inverter is running. This is simulated with another 1-wire chip, a DS2413, that triggers a relay (the button) and uses an opto-isolator to see if the inverter is active (the LED line). This allows the controller software on the Linksys router to turn the inverter on and off and it can check that it did so successfully.

The software runs on the Linux system in the router and is written in 'C'. The README file in the source package contains much more detail on how it works.

[Rob Beckers]

Interesting Robin! Thank you for the information.
I've spent 20+ years programming 8085/Z80/C/C++/Pascal and a few others, so I sympathize. Nice work!

-RoB-