Job at Atmospheric Research & Technology - 1980'sIn 1976 my father started ART as a consulting company to study the optimal placement of the windmills on Altamont Pass and Tehachapi. But he was unable to get reliable equipment. He started fabricating his own, which grew into a business that manufactured and marketed the wind monitoring equipment. I often did two of the physical jobs part-time. One was to set up the anemometer tower and equipment on new sites. And the other was to go around monthly and gather the data. Often we'd find that cows had knocked over the tower. We even tried surrounding it with electrical fence, still they'd get through and rub against it. Initially the data was collected to cassette tape via rs-232 modem. This was slow and unreliable. Later I assisted in the design of the "Squirrel" that was a swappable memory module. Around 1986 the tax laws changes and windmill construction stopped, resulting in the end of ART.
Bad cows
Brochure for the Windwatch
I had help wire-wrap some of the early circuit prototypes. I hated that tedious work. Below is the final circuit board for the Windwatch.
Valerie completing an anemometer-tower installation
ART tower at Golden Gate Bridge
Windwatch installed on new tower - indicating 25mph wind, total of 3.3 miles. The "Squirrel" in the top logs the total miles each hour.
Prior to the WindWatch and Squirrel, data collection units ran on 12 volt batteries that had to be swapped in the field each month, and data was transferred to cassette via slow RS-232.
ART Squirrel schematic by Ben Harris 1983 - CSU Chico
An early ART invention was the patented Quake-brake, that would shut off gas lines in the event of an earthquake:
The patented operation is a sophisticated mouse trap, where the steel ball rolls off the lever under jolts above a certain seismic activitity
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