This dashboard is being developed for the University of Michigan's team participating in the Department of Energy's Collegiate Wind Competition. The dashboard helps visualize essential data during turbine wind tunnel testing and sends inputs to the ESP32 Microcontroller. The inputs from the dashboard can control the blade pitch angle, the resistance in the turbine's circuit, and it can turn on the emergency stop, fully stopping the turbine. The resistance in the circuit can be controlled by sending voltage outputs from the ESP32 into a MOSFET relay that switches a power resistor on/off as shown below:
The blade pitch angle is controlled using a linear actuator that pushes on the blades, and the emergency stop is a combination of pitching the blades out of wind and increasing the circuit's resistance to its max value. The dashboard is live-updating and can be used to export graphs in PNG or CSV formats. The dashboard is able to receive data and send inputs by getting and posting request to an HTTP server hosted by the ESP32 microcontroller. The ESP32 microcontroller is programmed through Arduino IDE to constantly send RPM and Current values given through sensors and to receive Blade Pitch, Resistance, and Start and Stop controls.
Alec Jamil