The Whirlydoodle Project Makes Fun, Spinning Things (Video)

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There you were, one evening in Ann Arbor, MI, looking at a bunch of crazy spinning pinwheel-type things on light poles that seemed to change speed, colors, and light patterns with each minor wind shift. You were seeing Whirlydoodles. Slashdot met Whirlydoodle creator Timothy Jones at the 2012 Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire and shot a quick video of him and his colorful "micro-electric wind turbine" in action.

Timothy Jones: Hello. My name is Timothy Jones, and I’m the creator of the Whirlydoodle. Instead of giving you a numerical number for wind speed, I’m giving you kind of a color value. Now, it’s not perfectly linear, but it’s somewhat linear. And they’re a lot of fun. You could learn a lot about the wind based on observing the patterns of the wind and the direction of the wind.

Our design is a tailless wind-mill design, which tracks the wind, it ends up down wind, and it’s visible from 360 degrees. So you can tell the wind speed, you can tell the direction.

What we have here is an illustration of all the components in a generator. And so, we have them laid out in different ways. We have different cross-sectional views. We have an exploded view. And here we have a modified exploded view with all the components laid out.

Then you can also generate electricity with this. And what this is, is we have three identical generators with different amounts of load on them. This generator has no load, so you get an idea what kind of friction is involved in just rotating a generator without load. This has about maybe a 1 watt load. This has twice that load there, so maybe 2 watts. And you can tell the difference between how much force it takes to rotate the generator to generate electricity.

Slashdot: Cool. Thanks a lot.

Timothy Jones: You have some questions or you want to play with this? You can turn these generators if you want.

Bystander: Yeah, I’ve seen these all around Ann Arbor. I read an article about your invention – you are the inventor, right? – in AnnArbor.com. It’s really an interesting article.

Timothy Jones: Yeah, cool. Thanks. Yeah, there is a lot of cool things with components and things. I like taking things apart.