The Anemometer

I love kites. I began flying acrobatic kites about six years ago.

When you have been flying kites for a time you know exactly when the wind is enough to play a flight. Actually, you don’t need an anemometer.

Nevertheless this hobby was for me the perfect inspiration to build a new gadget: an Anemometer (needless, I must confess)

The first I build was made of ping-pong balls. I finished it with ‘metallic paint’, and I have to say that the appearance is quite factory-made.

I also programmed a displaying application for my beloved HP-48 calculator, so I could follow the trend of the wind speed by a graph on the calculator display.

This project of mine won the HP-48 Calculator Programming Contest of PC-WORLD ’99 - Wooow!! -.
The prize was a HP-48 calculator!!,
as it happens I already had one :-)).

After this anemometer I build a second, a compact version.
I designed this around a Pentium cooler fan.


I got rid of the fan motor and took advantage of the fantastic bearings of the cooler fan to make a neat and sturdy anemometer.

This time the display I used was a seven-segment type instead an alfa-numeric LCD.

Publishing at ELECTRONIC DESIGN

I have finally engraved my name in the wall of the fame!!
Yes, Electonic Design, one of the major technical magazine for engineers and engineering management around the world, has picked up one of my ideas to put it among other outstanding articles (as Bob Pease’s, for example!).

I submitted a contribution for the ‘Ideas For Design’ section that got published on May 15, 2000. The title: “BIDIRECTIONAL RS-232 COMMUNICATION USES ONLY ONE I/O LINE”.






The idea deals with the circumstance in which design constraints are so tight that only one input/output pin of a Microcontroller is available to perform a duplex communication.
I worked out a very creative approach that I wanted to share with the world.
Formulas and schematic are provided along the article to better understand the concept.

Hey, besides I got a $100 prize!!.