Michael Karas wrote:
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Another cool aspect of a discussion like this is that we get to learn new things. I have never before heard of a Savonius rotor wind turbine. They seem totally cool. I googled it and found some interesting stuff such as this link. This guy built a turbune using simple aluminum sheet and large diameter PVC pipe. He also used a DC motor from a tape drive as a generator.

Yep ! That's the link I found too
Also picoturbine.com had some great plans and some (circular) links, to a guy who does courses on making three phase permanent magnet alternators for your own windturbine. At first I thought this was a crazy thing to do, but of course they are brushless, and all you need to do is rectify the resulting stuff before passing it to the upconverter.

Anyway, the 8052bit has to go in. It would be a neat feature to put in a little weather station, and also suitable condition monitoring - if we use off the shelf 802.11, we get free ethernet ports for the job.

Steve