Design A Low Cost Wind Direction Sensor With High Accuracy

Wind is an important component that is beneficial to human life. For example, wind direction affects the landing and takeoff of an aircraft, wind helps fishermen for steering the boat while looking for fish. Wind can also be used as an alternative energy source that is environmentally friendly. Because of the importance of wind components, a device that can measure the wind parameters in a certain place is needed. Therefore, this study tries to create a cheap wind direction sensor which can be utilized by many people. In previous studies, reed switches, rotary encoders, and potentiometers have been used to create wind direction sensors. But this wind direction sensor has several weaknesses such as, it is not accurate, it has expensive production costs, and it has some friction that will strive against the movement of the wind, so it takes a minimum wind speed value for the wind direction measuring instrument to work. From these weaknesses, this study attempts to create wind direction sensors using other method namely light intensity method. This method used only a small LED light source with a Photodiode sensor, and a rotary disk. Test results indicated that this wind direction sensor had a mean of measurement error of 0.62% and the production cost of this wind direction sensor was only 50.300 rupiah or only about 3.5 US Dollar. From the value it can be concluded that the wind direction sensor made in this study was very well used to measure wind direction that occurred in a certain place and it could be produced with very cheap cost.