A friend of mine wants me to make him a weather monitoring station. Temperature and light leves are easy peasy, but ideally wind would be useful too (this thing is going to have a real life purpose!!)
It would require reverse engineering the sensor output though! im GUESSING its probably a cheapo hall effect sensor? Ill have a dig around for a data sheet. Has anyone else got any suggestions or thoughts?
That is a great price. Depending on how hardcore you want to be, you could build one. Wind speed guages are according to my research pretty easy to build. I remember one guy had his son hold their homemade contraption out the window, got their car to whatever speed and then counted pulses on a rotary encoder. They did this on several different speeds until he could extrapolate windspeed from number of pulses.
I wanted to do this for my dad for Christmas, but ended up buying one since there were a number of them that were going to give more functionality than I could easily do for the same money as parts. I have since found cheaper places to buy parts (direct from China) so that might not be true anymore.
It would be a fun project though. I am not sure I would have gotten the ok from my wife to have my son hanging stuff out a car window in the name of doing this project. If you have children, maybe your wife would be more fun than mine.
