Day 20: Building Controls

Trevor and Nino sanding the blades

As Micheal was out visiting a previous install with the assessor from the Ashton Awards, we took a taxi in with Tico where our first task was to give the blades another fine sand down so they would be ready for painting - meanwhile Dan continued with his welding.

A mess of a stator

Trevor making circuit boards

Another way in which WindAid is reaching out to the local community is by opening its doors to students at the local university. Having chatted with a number of the students it turned out that they are using the WindAid workshop to build a wind turbine for a university project. As their design is slightly different to ours it has been very interesting and instructive to discuss the different designs and troubleshoot any issues together*.

Daniel's prototype

This morning one of the students, Daniel gave Trevor and I a quick lesson in building the circuit board in the electronic control system. After lunch, and a quick trip to the shop to gather supplies in anticipation of a late night, we went back to try and build some of the circuit boards. It turns out that Trevor has much more skill in this area than I do, so I just stuck to taking pictures and making notes, and then helped the others to finish sanding the blades and putty up some holes in the stator.

Lets get soldering!

*Usually through Tico as a translator. Although it has to be said their efforts at explaining difficult concepts in English are far superior to our efforts at basic Spanish!