I2C Anemometer: cheap wind data logger
Lately I’ve been wondering if a wind-generator could help me lower my electricity bill (since my home server burns continuously some hundred watts per hour) in my town, Ponzano Romano. So I came up to the idea that wind data logging is absolutely a must for any further reasoning about wind – that is I need an anemometer. On internet prices for those devices may vary, but I was unable to find anything below 150€ which I think is a bit too much for what is just an experiment for fun.
From the very interesting forum energeticaambiente a post pointed me to the electronic italian magazine “Nuova Elettronica” that posted the following (relatively cheap) anemometer kit:
The kit is fine but is not meeting my requirements for data logging, that is I have the need of a constant wind speed recording into my server; since it’s possible to buy only the anemometer (without the logic board) I went that way.
Some applications using I2C
Parallel and serial ports are disappearing from today’s pc making life harder for the people who wants to connect their home-made devices to a pc. The USB bus seems to be very appealing but it has the drawback of complexity while the I2C bus is very easy to implement and it’s widely supported by many devices, with the drawback of no direct pc connection (to be honest it’s used inside the pc, so somewhere on the motherboard there is a I2C bus, but yet I haven’t found any decent connection to the external world to use it – no, i won’t solder things on memory modules). Since the first way to start experimenting with I2C is building an I2C port, I’ve built a parport-to-i2c interface implementing the I2C schematic made by Kosma Moczek with the idea of replacing it with a more modern USB-to-I2C solution in the future.
So here it is the prototype of the parport to I2C interface:
