This Is Your Pi on Wind
Got a special project for your Raspberry Pi that requires it to operate off the electrical grid? If solar power doesn't provide enough juice, add some wind to the mix with an inexpensive wind turbine.
Sizing a wind turbine to power your Raspberry Pi
Lead Image © Edvard Molnar, 123RF.com
Project Curacao is a sensor-filled project designed to hang on a radio tower on the island nation of Curacao. Curacao is a desert island 12 degrees north of the equator in the Caribbean, with a harsh environment that includes a strong tropical sun, salt spray from the ocean, and unremitting heat.
Curacao is a beautiful place, but it poses a real challenge for anyone who wants to install a Raspberry-Pi-based environmental monitoring system.
Project Curacao (Figure 1) is designed to monitor the local environment unattended for six months. The system will operate on solar power cells or wind power and will communicate with the designer via an iPad app called RasPiConnect (Figure 2). Most of the electronics fit inside the box shown in Figures 3 and 4.
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