Re: How does a wind vane work?

Richard Grenfell wrote:
I'd like to know how a wind vane works.

Many years ago I worked with a guy who was doing the electronics for a
friend's DIY wind vane. The business end of the wind vane was a disc
whioh rotated with the vane. A light sorce illuminated the disc whic had
concentric strips of aluminium foil to reflect the light onto a set of
photocells arranged radially. The outputs from the photocells gave a binary number which the electronics converted into, I think, degrees.
The clever bit was to use a form of binary called the Gray Code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code) which avoided spurious readings when the vane dithered on the boundary between two headings.
Brian

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