Build Instructions

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• 1

  Step 1: Telescoping Pole Setup ​

  First, prepare the pieces of EMT conduit which will telescope inside of one another:

  1. Wear protective equipment (e.g. safety glasses). Safety first!
  2. Mark the desired cut length for the EMT conduit using a marker. For this article, we used three 5-foot lengths of 1", 3/4", and 1/2" EMT conduit.
  3. Use a rotary cutting tool to cut the conduit to length.
  4. Remove the sharp edge on the cut using a metal wire, or a rotary deburring tool or reamer.
  5. Process the conduit as desired (paint, powder coat, etc.)

  Assemble your telescoping pole - creating a telescoping pole from EMT conduit is easy using the telescoping coupling/clamp system from Elation Sports Technologies:

  1. Press-fit the inner sleeve onto the smaller piece of conduit.
  2. Install the injection-molded coupling/clamp onto the larger piece of conduit using a Phillips head screwdriver.
  3. Extend the pole to the desired length by sliding the smaller piece of conduit, and then tightening the hand knob.

  
  

  Additionally, for this project, in order to mount the wind speed and wind direction sensors on separate pieces of 1/2" EMT conduit, I utilized a conduit bender tool to bend and then cut to length an S-shaped piece of conduit. There are multiple video tutorials online detailing how to bend EMT conduit using this tool.
  

• 2

  Step 2: 3D Printed Parts and Mounting the Electronics

  To mount the electronics to the EMT conduit, I designed several custom 3D-printed parts, all of which can be found for free to download from Thingiverse (links are below):

  1. 2 x Wind sensor mount
  2. 2 x 1/2" EMT conduit side-to-side clamp
  3. 1 x 1/2" EMT Solderless breadboard snap-on mount

  I printed the parts using 100% infill on a Voxelab Aires 3D printer and 1.75mm diameter black PLA filament. The mechanical hardware used to mount the electronics are:

  1. 8 x M4 screw, 14mm length
  2. 8 x M4 hex nut
  3. 4 x 10-32 machine screw, 1/2" length
  4. 4 x 10-32 hex nut

  An alternative method for mounting the S-shaped 1/2" EMT conduit piece to the telescoping conduit pole is to drill through both pieces of conduit and secure them using a 1/4"-20 bolt and nut.

• 3

  Step 3: Wiring

  The wind speed and wind direction sensors are connected to the Arduino according to the wiring diagram shared below. They are supplied with 5V, and output an analog signal proportional to their measured quantities (i.e. wind speed or wind direction angle.)

  I removed the caps from the wind sensors to see how they work. They each have a printed circuit board (PCB) mounted inside, with the primary sensor located on the top side, and the processing circuitry on the underside. Both styles of sensors used for this article output an analog output signal from 0 to 5V which updates approximately every 0.8 seconds, and which can be directly read by the Arduino. Other variations of the wind sensors are available for different voltage ranges, and for current or pulse output.

  The wind speed sensor uses a break-beam/optical limit switch (photointerrupter) and plastic tabs on the rotating upper piece; when the sensor is blocked versus unblocked by the plastic tabs, a 5V pulse is detected and counted by the PCB, and the rate of those pulses correlates with the rotation speed, and thus the wind speed.

  The wind direction sensor utilizes either a hall effect sensor, or a digital magnetic encoder, with a radially-polarized disc-shaped magnet mounted on the underside of the upper rotating portion of the wind sensor. The magnetic sensor is able to measure the magnetic field strength to determine the orientation of the radially-polarized magnet, which therefore tells us the direction that the wind is blowing. YouTuber James Bruton published a video illustrating this principle.

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