The above image is an Arduino micro controller board with a piggy back board known as a shield that is designed for data logging. Also there are two custom boards I personally made for hooking up renewable energy sources. Click the image for a bigger view.

If you know me or read my blog periodically, you probably know that I have been working for several years on a renewable energy project. What you may not know is how close it is to being available on the market. The current prototype is outperforming everything I can find in a similar cost category. The real trick is the length of time for the comparison sample. I can only sit with a video camera and stopwatch so long. I am also prone to mistakes occasionally, being human and all. That's where the Arduino comes in.

The Arduino is a real multitasking geeks dream. This little circuit board is equiped with an ATMEGA328 processor, a sqeek of memory and is designed to be easy to program and easy to hook up to the real world in the form of switches, sensors, meters and anything else that can have electrical interaction. If you really want to learn a lot about it, go to www.ladyada.net. I highly recommend buying one from them if you are interested. Make any follow up units from scratch, but there is so much involved I highly recommend the first one is assembled and tested before you play with it.

I have worked with an open source set of "sketch's" , this is what an Arduino program is called, and combined them to work with my particular needs. The above Frankenboard is ready to record power production for 3 renewable sources such as wind and solar and collect temperature and light value at the same time. I don't need extreme resolution, so it will take a reading from all sources every 3 seconds and time stamp each reading down to the second. Later I will use a plotting software program to see the comparison. I intend to gather a week or more, maybe a month as a good representation of real world conditions.

Someday soon I hope to officially announce my wind turbine here.

Another good source for Arduino stuff is at the related link below.