If you have ever been in a remote area and pulled out your laptop I bet you couldn’t find any open WiFi hotspots. Well with this Wind Turbine powers WiFi-Repeater that Dan Lampie and David Brenner from the Rochester Institute of Technology built that problem has been solved on a tiny budget. A highly directional antenna is used to send and receive the WiFi data from a location with internet connectivity to the remote area and a WiFi repeater is used to extend the wireless. That is all well and good but chances are your remote location isn’t going to have a handy outlet to plug into. To solve this Dan and David use wind and solar power to charge a battery that powers the rig.
Thanks for the tip David.
“The power meter works by reading the amount of current flowing into the batteries from the turbine on a continuous basis. This is achieved using a Hall-Effect current sensor that can read up to 30A, which is much more than what the turbine is capable of. We utilized two Linksys WRT54G routers running the DD-WRT firmware to achieve Internet connectivity. One router was located on the second floor of an RIT building .33 miles away from the communication node. The router in the office was connected to the Internet and used a 8dBi external omni directional antenna to broadcast the signal. The communication node’s router used a 19dBi parabolic directional antenna pointed at the router in the building.”
