Given all the interest in wind energy these days, and the fact that I live in a very windy area, I decided to start measuring wind speed and direction. I found some inexpensive, robust wind instruments, a cheap AVR microcontroller, and set out to build the firmware using an open source C compiler, WinAVR, based on the GNU gcc for Windows. I mounted the wind instruments on my garage and fed the signal to the AVR controller I have in my home office. The AVR microcontroller spits wind speed data out the serial port which is connected to the Linux box. That server turns the wind data into an XML file that's served by an Apache web server. I wrote an example Flash application which reads the XML and adjusts some graphical meters in near-real time (every 5 seconds.) I've released the project as Open Source under the Apache v2 license for the software I wrote. Take a look at OSCirrus.see-do.org for more details, schematics, sensor construction, and downloads of source code. Since I've put up the sensors, I've captured some huge and sustained gusts of wind. Here is a snapshot of the Flash-based GUI that shows the speed history during a severe wind storm that had gusts up to 60mph: So, dig in, have fun.