Indoor Wind Chimes
Motivation:
I saw a tweet once that said, “if your neighbor has wind chimes, you have wind chimes.” That made me reflect on all the annoying times I had lived next door to people with wind chimes, which are lovely when you want to hear them, but kind of stink when you don’t have the option to make them go quiet. It also made me feel guilty about the various wind chimes that I’d owned over the years.
I took that feeling as motivation to create a simple solution for making wind chimes more personal.
Process:
3D Printed Parts:
There are three parts, design in Fusion 360 and printed on a Prusa MK3S, that make up this project: the wind ups, motor mount, and servo/Arduino mount. I’m love the problem solving that needs to occur when designing for fused deposition modeling. One consideration was that the motor needed to be well protected from the wet, outdoor environment. There is an upwards sloping lip on the motor mount that fits inside a corresponding cavity on the wind cups, making it difficult for the water to enter. Additionally, the wind cups were widely spread on my printers bed, but with little contact area, so I added semi circles on the cups to help adhere them to the platform while printing. I usually try to avoid prints that require scaffolding, so the cups are not spherical hemispheres. They are actually about 40% of a sphere, which avoided most of the overhangs that would have otherwise caused issues.
Electronics:
There are three main parts to this project: the anemometer (wind gauge), the servo that shakes the chimes, and the Arduino. The servo is mounted on a 3D printed plate, which also holds and Arduino Nano on the back side and can be hung vertically on a wall. The anemometer was made by salvaging a small DC motor out of a cheap RC car, then 3D printing a holder for it and some wind cups to make it spin. As I hope everyone remembers from high school physics, a DC motor is just a combination of permanent magnets and electromagnets (coils of wire with current flowing through them). You can put current through the coils, making them into electromagnets, which will push away from the permanent magnets, giving you kinetic energy out. You can also put kinetic energy into the motor (say by letting the wind spin the motor axle), which moves the coils of wire through the magnetic field of the permanent magnets, inducing a current. In this project we are doing the latter.
