Mini - Wind Turbine

thingiverse

A three-blade wind turbine design, capable of yielding around 1.4 volts in favorable wind conditions, can also function as a miniature fan when the motor is connected to a battery. This is the first completed project of the designer and is available on Thingiverse. The structure consists of two printed parts: blades and a holder hub. All three blades must be printed vertically, fitting snugly into the holder hub (which can also be glued for added strength). The STL files are ready to print for Makerbot users. The orientation of the blades during printing may affect their outcome due to skeinforge's start and stop extrusion points for each layer. The design was created using OpenSCAD, a software that allows users to modify various blade parameters like length, curvature, thickness, and width, making it easy to recompile and print customized blades. The 2D blade representation is converted into a 3D shape using the linear_extrude function and a .dxf file created from Inkscape. To create .dxf files from .svg files, use pstoedit. The makefile included in the project demonstrates how this process works.