Home Made wind direction indicator

Who needs modern technology.

I stopped using GPS years ago. Now I simply look up at my masthead windex and follow the arrow

 

yeah, its great the way the arrow always points in the direction you need to go. Its the same technique Johnny Depp used with his magic compass

 

No. That was CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow.
And it brought him to the end of the world and back

q.e.d. (?)

 

How about only a transducer? On the display of your RC controll, you then can read the angle.

 

I want to read it in conjunction with the speed - so recording it on the GPS video would be the ideal method.

 

Adding this info for future reference -
An Arduino based kit intended to meteorological applications here ( principles explained and attached

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8942


it appears that
Ultrasonic Anemometer (Wind speed and direction)

are the solution - heres a home made one. Shame you need a physics degree :-(

http://www.technik.dhbw-ravensburg.de/~lau/ultrasonic-anemometer.html


Basic principles here
http://www.ultrasonicwindsensor.com/

 

Yes - it made my brain hurt.

What if you took a 'mast' like a piece of 1/8 ss welding rod with a bit of ribbon as a windsock or parachute at the top.

Mount that to a cross shaped base.

Put a load cell on each leg of the cross shaped base.

direction would be a simple calc as you would only get a load on 2 cells max.

ratio the loads and do a Sin/Cos and will give you the angle.

Square the loads and add, then do a Squareroot to get the force which is a factor of windspeed.

No moving parts and could be scaled easily to a sensible model size?

 

This is an intriguing concept however I am not clear how "you would only get a load on 2 cells max."

With no wind, all the cells would be recording equal loads. As the wind grows, load should rise on 1 or 2 cells and reduce on the opposite ones so the net force will be the difference between a cell and its opposite cell.

Your calculations for 2 forces would remain the same.

This might work for a steady state but wouldn't the inertial forces caused by waves swamp the load changes due to the wind?

 

A lit cigarette works pretty good for cheap.

 

Well spotted, I was indeed assuming a zero'd baseline when I said 'load' so I should have either quoted that or used 'additional load',

 

what about putting a small magnet horizontally centred on the bottom end of the wind vane pivot?

2 hall effect analogue sensors placed at 90 degrees to each other will generate 2 voltage sources whose values vary in a sine and a cosine shaped manner versus direction of vane.

You can by this off the shelf.

All you need is one of the simple single chip micros with 2 A to D convertors and some software to work out the direction.