I can not really take credit for this one, but a couple weekends ago I helped a friend of mine, Dan Lampie, set up a wind turbine here at RIT (check out his website for more details). Dan has been talking about/working on this project for about a year now (well, he started it last year at least). Last summer he sent me a couple of pictures of the turbine set up in his backyard. It was more or less the same set up that he has now, only the previous iteration was just being used to power a light bulb (and to measure what kind of power it can supply). Dan built the whole thing himself along with a bit of advice from a professor and some internet forums. It is quite impressive and (at least to me) surprisingly not terribly complicated to do.

He wanted to set it up at RIT for Imagine RIT: RIT’s Innovation & Creativity Festival (on May 3rd, if you are in the area, check it out). After about half a year of red tape and bureaucracy (literally 100s of emails), he finally managed to get RIT’s permission to install it on campus. Dan drove up for the weekend from Boston (where he’s currently interning at Cisco) and asked me to help him set it up. We took a bunch of pictures, so here’s a few. This first one is after we got most of the stakes down, when we were installing the turbine itself onto the post.

I’m the one with my back turned to the camera, Dan is in front of me, and Chris (who also offered to help) is the one in the brown sweatshirt.

The next step was just to stake everything down. You can’t really tell from the picture, but the ground was extremely wet as it had been raining quite a bit. The stakes went in rather easily, but we were covered in mud by the time we finished.

This picture shows the electronics that make the whole thing work. Dan built the charging circuit himself. Essentially the windmill recharges two 12V batteries and the circuit exists to make sure it does not over charge them. The wireless AP/repeater (not in the picture) is connected to the battery terminals. We “waterproofed” it using plumber’s putty, the platic tuperware box, and that metal box that Dan got off ebay). It is not exactly environmentally tested, but the components are rugged enough that they should be fine even if a bit of water gets in there from humidity/condensation.

There’s Dan standing proud with his finished product. As you can tell from the picture, when there’s a big gust the blades spin pretty fast. Standing right underneath it was kinda scary, but it is very stable. The location is not ideal for a wind turbine because the trees/buildings shield it from the wind, but it still works. The building behind him is Gracie’s (the main RIT cafeteria on the dorm side of campus). The turbine’s AP gets the wifi signal from there and then broadcasts it down the “quarter mile” (RIT’s main walkway from the dorm to the academic side of campus). We haven’t done too much extensive testing of it, but it does work. Dan will probably be up here before the festival to do a bit more tweaking of the project. It’s certainly cool and goes along with the seemingly “new trend” of eco-friendliness/”going green.” If you are interested in doing something like this yourself, there is a vast amount of resources online (search diy wind turbine) or contact me and I can get you in touch with Dan.

I think I mentioned this project in a previous post, if not here it goes: I plan to make a wireless, portable internet boombox from a bunch of parts I scrounged up/have had lying around my house for a while. I bought a Netgear WGT634U wireless router off of ebay for ~$30. The reason I went for this particular model is that it comes with a USB port on the router itself. This was really useful since it allowed me to buy a cheap USB sound card off of ebay (~$5). This, combined with an old Magnavox boombox that I have had for years, will form my wireless boombox. My goal is to have it be completely battery powered, but that may not be 100% feasible.

As soon as I got the router, I spent a few hours installing and configuring/playing with OpenWRT. Unfortunately the sound card shipped from Hong Kong, so I had to wait about a week for it to get here. It finally arrived yesterday and as soon as I got a chance today, I hooked it up and started streaming my music over the air.

There’s a picture of the setup I have so far. I took the top of the router off to start messing around with it and haven’t put it back on yet. That little thing jutting out of the back of the router is the USB sound card. The boombox does not have an aux in port, so for now I ripped apart a really old pair of head phones and attached the leads to the tape deck head. I don’t have long enough screwdrivers to take apart the boombox yet, but once I do I plan to take out the electronics for the cd player and enclose the router in the boombox. Also, I will attach the headphone leads more permanently (likely replacing the cd player module’s connections). The other thing I need to do is find an appropriate battery to power this set up as I would really like it to be truly wireless.

Once all of that is out of the way, the only thing left to do is to figure out how to control the thing. I plan on using mpd/mpc for the music player software, but having to ssh to the boombox to get it to play music somewhat defeats the purpose. The router does have a serial console port, so I may end up wiring the buttons on the boombox to change the song and use a c program to monitor it and trigger the appropriate mpc commands. Another option/additional feature might be setting up a very simple webpage that I could view from my phone that displays information about the current song and allows the various playback controls. I don’t have one of those fancy smart phones, but my phone should be able to support something like that. Besides that, I could also have a fancier AJAX-y web interface (but again, that seems to defeat the purpose). I am looking forward to finishing this thing up, but I have quite a bit of school work these next couple of weeks so I’ll see how it goes. The weather’s getting nicer outside so I’d really like to get this thing together and use it at a BBQ.

Yesterday I hosted and attended my first BarCamp ever and it was awesome! What is a BarCamp? Basically, it is an “unconference” – an ad hoc gathering of individuals to share knowledge about various topics through presentations. The key – every one is a participant, no spectators. To be honest, I was more than a bit skeptical at first, but I could not be more pleased with the event. It was great. But before I get to the details, I want to thoroughly thank all of our sponsors that helped us out this year (clearspring, IEEE Computer Society, Computer Science House, RIT CS Department, HTB Press, Microsoft, and Google). We could not have done it without them and hopefully they will all continue to support events like this.

The most import thing about a BarCamp, however, are its participants – ours were amazing! We had presentations on just about everything. Just a little sampling: political lobbying, intellectual property, jQuery, 3d user interface design, robotics, multitouch, network security, OpenID, CPU Design (me!), the future of RF technologies, shellcode exploits, telephone-controlled web applications, board game strategy, One Laptop Per Child Initiatives at RIT (me!), XSLT, Grid Computing, and all kinds of other cool stuff. I learned a lot about a bunch of cool new stuff that people are working on, but my favorite part was all of the discussion that occurred. The level of participation and interaction between the presenter and the attendees for each of the talks is what made this BarCamp such a success. You could tell that everyone was legitimately interested in what they were there to hear about (even if they had never heard of it before!). A lot of the talks turned into more of a discussion of a topic than a simple lecture with a question and answer session, which really is the ideal format for this conference.

If you have never experienced a BarCamp before, I encourage you to give it a try. How can you go wrong with a bunch of smart people with a desire to learn and share knowledge? To give you more of an idea of what it was like, check out some of the pictures from this year and last. Not everyone uses flickr, so if you have a facebook account, roam around there and you should hopefully find some more pictures.

After such a great experience, I am looking forward to planning and hosting the next BarCamp. I liked it so much, I’m going to try to put together two of them next year – one in the fall, and one in the spring. So, be on the lookout for BarCampRochester4 and 5. If you are interested in helping out, shoot me an email! Again, thanks to the sponsors and the participants for making this such a great BarCamp!