Category Archives: anemometer

Custom Cut Pinwheel Makes a Useful HVAC Duct Flow Meter

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Everyone is familiar with pinwheels, and few of us haven’t crafted one from a square of paper, a stick, and a pin. Pinwheels are pretty optimized from a design standpoint, and are so cheap and easy to build that putting a pinwheel to work as an HVAC duct flow meter seems like a great idea.

Great in theory, perhaps, but as [ItMightBeWorse] found out, a homemade pinwheel is far from an ideal anemometer. His experiments in air duct flow measurements, which previously delved into ultrasonic flow measurement, led him to try mechanical means. That calls for some kind of turbine …read more

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Old Motor Donates Rotor for Coaxial Wind Vane and Anemometer

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Problem: build a combined anemometer and wind vane where the pivots for both sensors are coaxial. Solution: turn an old universal motor into a step-wise potentiometer for the wind vane, and then pull a few tricks to get the whole thing assembled.

We have to admit that when we first saw [Ajoy Raman]’s Instructables post, we figured that he used a universal motor to generate a voltage from the anemometer. But [Ajoy]’s solution to the coaxial shafts problem is far more interesting than that. A discarded universal motor donated its rotor and bearings. The windings were stripped off the assembly …read more

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Solar-powered Weather Station Has the Complete Suite of Sensors

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There was a time when getting weather conditions was only as timely or as local as the six o’clock news from the nearest big-city TV station. Monitoring the weather now is much more granular thanks to the proliferation of personal weather stations. For the ultimate in personalized weather, though, you might want to build your own solar powered weather station.

It looks like [Brian Masney] went all out in designing his weather station. It supports a full stack of sensors – wind speed and direction, rain, temperature, pressure, and dew point. About the only other parameters not supported (yet) are …read more

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