I had to chuckle at how he nonchalantly just whips up a mill simulator or a Python script for the shape of the blade. Each of those alone would be worth digging into in detail.
Needless to say, this article is my motivator for the day.
The windmill is really cool, but reminds me of some trivia.
Remember how Don Quixote was fighting windmills because they were "giants oppressing the people"? He was right! And everyone in Cervantes' day knew it.
Windmills did not, contrary to popular belief, mostly spread as convenient labour-saving devices. Instead they spread as a way for the local lord to enforce taxes. When peasants had hand mills, there was no easy way to see how much food they really had grown, so it was hard to collect taxes. But if they go to the local miller, the miller takes your grain, grinds it, and then takes the lord's cut right there. There is no possible hiding of the food you've grown.
In countries with a strong peasant class, like Sweden, the lords were unable to introduce this form of central taxation. And I've read reports that hand mills were still in use there as late as WW II.
This is actually a serious question - for the various makers on HN, is it sacrificing other things, older (or no) children, flexible jobs, independant income. Or just really awesome time management?
I would like to know so either I stop beating myself up for bad time management, or improve it.
I've built lots of little side projects (see http://jgc.org/labs.html) and I have lots of other commitments (like a full time job and I'm not wealthy) and I can tell you a few things that have worked for me:
1. No TV. About four years ago I got rid of my TV. It started as an accident and turned into a habit. Now I watch movies either via a streaming service or DVD. I also watch some TV series (typically I will watch one series at a time, finish it and then move on so there might be one evening a week where I will watch, say, an episode of Downton Abbey). The key here is that I never plonk myself down in front of a TV and channel hop and I'm ruthless about the quality of what I am watching.
2. Null route reddit, Facebook, etc. I realized I was wasting a lot of time on sites that have no actual value other than as a pure distraction. I simply null routed them in my broadband router.
3. Slow down. Some of my projects take forever because I don't have time. I stopped worrying about it and gain satisfaction when I do finish things. Just the other day I was making a nightlight out of a candy can, an old perfume bottle, an old wall wart and some LEDs as a gift for a small child. I realized that I'd started it when $SIBLING was pregnant.
4. Make time in a relationship. It's also important to tell your spouse or whatever that you are going to spend time doing something away from them. That way you can carve out some space (might be just an hour a week) where you do what you want.
5. Parallelize. I tend to make lots of things simultaneously. That way when I've got a spare 20 minutes I can do something on one of them. For example, on the nightlight I recall a couple of months ago realizing I didn't need to go to bed right then and I could spend 15 minutes hot gluing some parts of it together.
PS One more thing... I think some 'distractions' become less important as you get older. In my experience, it's more important when you are younger to know about the latest TV shows, movies, memes etc. than as you get older. You may 'need' to know about them for some forms of social acceptance. As I am no longer young I don't feel the need to 'fit in' as much and so when someone says "Did you see X Factor last night?", I just go "No" and we talk about something else.
PPS And by observing others in the 'maker movement' who have children their solution seems to be to involve their children in the things they want to do. Chris Anderson is a good example of this, his kids seem to always be involved in his projects. I saw a talk where he was discussing 3D printing techniques and a number of his examples were of things he'd made with his kids for them.
For some time I've been convinced that a key skill for negotiating life in this century will be avoiding useless distraction. This has probably always been true, but the distractions seem to have ramped-up in the last 10-15 years. People who are unable to avoid being continually distracted will increasingly stressed, dissatisfied, and unsuccessful.
There is probably money to be made in coaching this skill.
This is what I love about HN - I throw my hands in the air at the whole world, and suddenly people I respect are giving me a fix.
Just the things I was looking for. I suspect we all really know many of these - especially TV!
The one I would not have guessed is accepting the pace. Things take the time they take, given everything else in your life. A friend has just got me to restart an OSS project based on us agreeing slower, more realistic output from each other.
Just pottering along and celebrating the wins - I could get to like that.
As for makers involving children - I can see that being the most rewarding portion - just this afternoon I picked up my 3 year old from pre-school and we wondered into the churchyard. He needed an item beginning with S, and so we stripped some bark for twining, tied a cross piece to a stick and added leaves for hair.
He had a stickman to take in tomorrow.
I did too much of the making, but he enjoyed it I think. Its a start.
Years ago when offered a raise at a previous job I asked for less working hours instead. So nowadays I get paid to work 32 hours a week, but still work a normal 40-hour work week. That gives me 8 hours / week at the office for hobby software projects, and more than enough time in the evenings and weekends to spend time with family and friends.
That's a very interesting approach to career progression, I like it! Wonder how well such a request would be received in most occupations? A higher wage is nice, but more free time is infinitely more valuable.
As someone with a young family (multiple children too young to participate in any hobbies) a full-time job, extended family and a house to look after, I'd suggest the "stop beating yourself up" route. Yes, you could be doing all sorts of cool projects, but it would probably have to be at the expense of other things. Cool projects will wait, but your family won't wait, and they will grow up in your absence.
As you've stated in another comment: accept the pace. One strategy I'm trying is to just noodle away with whatever time is available. I doubt I will be able fit in a "change the world" sized project, but I'm hoping
1) It will be surprising how little time some things take to do, once a start has been made.
2) Once I'm underway, I'm hoping that time wasters, such as TV, will naturally be pushed aside as I find it is more enjoyable to do other stuff.
One issue I'm finding is that's important to have a well organised workspace (mine is not yet). Otherwise all the small snippets of time get used up with finding things, rather than doing things.
Really awesome article @jacquesm, I love these intricate, in-depth, long struggling-for-a-labour-of-love stories.
In fact, not to wax overly lyrical, I think a lot of stories that appeal to people in general follow that pattern. Something about the best aspects of humanity in that kind of endeavour.
That's a fantastic story. Now that the research is done, open sourcing this data could allow many people especially in poorer places of the world (once they can access the right tools, which might be a severe stumbling block) to create similar machines and gain power.
I wouldn't have thought that creating a windmill is such a difficult thing. Always cool to learn something new from an unknown domain.
I had forwarded your article to a friend a few hours ago, and he asked me if it had been open sourced. I told him I did not know, but from what I have read of your writing, I was sure you would be most helpful to anyone following in your footsteps. Just the information you have already passed on is invaluable.
Technical error: the force of the wind depends on the square of the wind speed (q = rho * u^2/2). The cube law refers to power (proportional to rho * u^3/2).
Good article though. For those using software to design and analyze mechanical designs with "pretty good confidence," there's nothing more humbling than actually trying to build it.
You're absolutely right, I was using 'force' in the laypersons sense of the word, not the way an engineer would use it, I should have used power instead. I've updated the post to correct the error. Thank you!
Just being pedantic, but shouldn't it be called a wind turbine, not windmill? After all, it's outputting electricity and you're not grinding down grains or corn. Either way, this was very interesting. Good work.
How great would it be if he could mass produce these! He gained incredible insight leading to variable pitch blades, process of making the various parts...if I were a homeowner & actually had cash I'd buy one in an instant.
Or even write a detailed ebook showing others how to do the same, and maybe sell the tricky parts like the stator sheets and blades to budding windmill DIYers. Great project.
> It has survived numerous storms and worked very well supplying our house with reliable power, far more reliable than the solar panels we had used exclusively up to the point the windmill was finished.
Italy certainly has its share of troubles these days, but the above made me smile a bit. There are still some good things here.
jacquesm, For some strange and unknown reason, I'm recalling a story
about a very powerful magnet suspended in the air, and very heavy
metal table... also in the air, attached to said magnet.
Wind force goes up as the square of speed, not the cube. Available power goes up as the cube.
Friends of mine are building vertical axis turbines. The key to safety seems to be to make the blades out of lightweight foam & kevlar so that if they do shatter they aren't flinging big heavy pieces around.
As for vertical axis turbines, they are a very tempting way to spend a ton of money without ever shipping a viable product. Many very solidly engineered examples of this exist, none of which have stood the test of time. This is a real pity because I think that the Darrieus rotor is one of the most pleasing purely technical designs ever made by man.
"If you bought a machine with those specs commercially it would have cost about $10,000, but that would not be a variable pitch one. This machine cost a (fairly) large multiple of that, not counting our time, tooling and so on, but it could be reproduced well under that $10,000 mark if you already had all the tools and the knowledge and you didn’t have to go through a prototyping stage."
I do not believe you have built a windmill- you have built a proper wind turbine.
Very cool project- there are a good number of residential scale manufacturers out there, but I believe this is the first homebrew wind turbine I've seen.
How much of the difficulty could have been avoided if the windmill wasn't for generating power? This is an amazing project, but I wonder if it would be quite possible just to get something looking nice that stands strong (even against wind force at the cube of its speed) without such quality lathes and metalworking tools. Obviously, you have decades of experience in the field as you noted, and I doubt this would be possible for most people.
FTA: "In the end the machine produced 2250 Watts at 10 m/s winds ..."
Cool tech - it would be interesting to see a cost/benefit analysis
mapping months to break-even from local $/kWh costs and local wind
speeds.
We'll know that alternative energy generation has really arrived
when real-estate listings include sun-exposure / insolation figures
and annual wind-energy availability along with annual tax estimates
and water well outputs.
Cool tech - it would be interesting to see a cost/benefit analysis mapping months to break-even from local $/kWh costs and local wind speeds.
In the article he mentions they don't have grid power, so the payoff will be pretty quick vs. the generator they have. He said they used the generator a lot because their solar panels weren't enough.
Until you hit 500 RPM dead quiet, above that it makes a swooshing noise, but that quickly gets drowned out by the wind :)
Yes, Eggbeater (the proper term is a Darrieus rotor) are theoretically more quiet, and even more efficient.
Unfortunately those designs suffers from an incurable tendency to vibrate to pieces. There are so many modes of resonance that they don't live long.
Cap Chat in Canada has or had a fantastic machine of that type, but it was shut down after a minimal amount of operation because the safety of the machine could not be guaranteed, even in moderate winds. Google for Cap Chat Eole for more information.
I went there to visit the machine because I considered a VAT (vertical axis turbine) but decided against it because of this tendency to spray windmill bits & pieces.
There are a few more of them near the Canadian Rockies but those are also mothballed.
I still believe this to be one of the most beautiful designs.
Needless to say, this article is my motivator for the day.