A few weeks ago I headed down to rural France, near Toulouse to take part in a week-long Development Camp working on wind turbine measurement for the group Wind Empowerment.

About 10 people came from all parts of Europe, along with people joining via Skype from all parts of the world.

We discussed ideas and specifications and prototyped equipment for monitoring wind resource and remote monitoring and managing wind turbines.

This development week was all about monitoring and recording data from wind turbines.

This included:

Wind speed
Wind direction
Rotation speed
Current, both AC and DC
Voltage, both AC and DC

We first set about specifying the requirements of an ideal data logging and monitoring system.

This was drawn up into an overview system diagram.

Each of the various blocks was discussed and all ideas relating to each section of the unit were discussed. This means that we will all be working towards the same standards and interfaces, even if we don’t all use the same hardware.

There were some interesting projects shown by the attendees including:

A really nice education wind turbine generator.

3D printed educational turbine blades

This was an anemometer calibration test rig (using my data logger to record the pulses).

We used English as the working language, but French was the language of food and drinks in the evening. We had an amazing constant stream of great communal cooking from the attendees.