Winpole Ventures Evaluating breeze
Windpole Ventures (http://www.windpoleventures.com/)of Arlington Massachusetts is developing a network of 6000 towers across the US. They have begun evaluations of Etesian’s wireless and self-powered sensor. WPV addresses the challenge of wind integration and intermittency by improving the quality of data available to ISOs, wind developers and operators, resource analysts, power traders and government.
Atlantic Marine, Boston MA, installs 2 breeze systems
Atlantic Marine installed a breeze on each of its two cranes. These cranes have been in operation for many years. The wireless sensor made it a snap for them to have them up and running in a matter of a hours. In the photo below you can see the sensor mounted about half way up the crane on the right side of the platform guard rail.
Etesian Technologies at New England Boat Show
Etesian Technologies will have a booth (number 608) at this year’s New England Boat Show. The show starts Saturday, February 20th, and runs until Sunday February 28th. The show is being held at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston, 415 Summer St., Boston, MA. A map to the show:
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Company founder Bill Stein will be present to demonstrate the company’s premier product “breeze”, a wireless self-powered anemometer. A full working system with readout mounted on an Edson Pedestal guard will be at the booth. Join us for a fun and informative show.
More information about the NE Boat Show can be found at their web site, http://www.newenglandboatshow.com
New software for the breeze
With a serial port connection to the breeze receiver, any Mac (OS X) or PC (‘98, 2K, XP) can be used as a logger for wind speed (and direction, if you have a direction sensor, of course). Below is a screen snapshot of the software:
Choose the com port number your receiver is attached to, pick your preferred averaging interval, hit the Start arrow ( -> ) in the top left corner, and logging begins. A dialog box will ask you to name your log file. As pictured, the logger is set to take 10 minute averages (600 seconds). The display meters show the current wind speed and direction, and the last 10 minutes of wind is shown on the strip chart. Every averaging period the average wind speed, average direction, the maximum wind speed, the minimum wind speed and the standard deviation of the wind speed,along with a time and date stamp is written to a text file which is easily opened with most spreadsheet programs, such as Excel. The software is provided free with all breeze purchases.
Custom Project
One of our customers wanted a pre-packaged system that would work easily at distances to 300 feet and beyond. We were up to the challenge. The sensor has been refined over a period of years and really doesn’t leave us much room for improvement easily. Adding a hi gain directional antenna to it is possible but doesn’t seem very elegant. Instead, why not add an antenna and preamplifier to the receiver, on the ground, where it’s a bit easier to work with? And that is exactly what we did.
Apologies are in order for the less than spectacular pictures. But its tough to get a good photo when the sensor and receiver are 325 feet apart. That’s right, 325 ft and still going strong. (We ran out of space in our field test!) Below is a picture of the sensor at the far end of the field temporarily propped up on a folding table and barrel.
Below is a photo of our quick and dirty setup. We tossed the antenna, preamp and receiver on a card table along with our oldest laptop to log the results. No dropouts over several hours operation.
