DIY Water Turbine + Circuit Design and Instruction Manual

Hello! This is an instruction manual for building a DIY water turbine and a simple circuit. (As a disclaimer, I was missing an integral piece of my generator kit from the beginning and was unable to find a replacement. I will be writing this instruction manual as if I was able to create a working turbine and generator.)

Input materials:

• 4-5 heads of plastic spoons 
• A spool of heavy weight wire
• Hand-crank generator
• Hot glue
• Pliers 
• Wire cutter

Output materials:

• Alligator clip wires
• Wires
• LED light bulb 
• 1.5V battery holder 
• 2 AA batteries 
• Breadboard 
• Resistor 
• Wire connector
• Alligator clip wires, negative and positive 

Cut the heads off of the plastic spoons, use hot glue to connect the heads to each other. Cut a 5-6 inch piece of heavy weight wire with your wire cutters/pliers. If you don't have wire cutters, nail clippers work really well! Push the wire through the conjunction of the spoons and hot glue and then wrap around.

Assemble your turbine by attaching it through the hand held generator. Attach the red and black wires of your LED lightbulb (the one with wires attached) to the prongs on either side of the generator. Set up your turbine under a running water source, like your sink, and watch as the LED lights up!

I started by inserting the LED light bulb’s positive prong into 19D and the negative prong into 20D. Followed by inserting the red wire into 19C and then into the left side positive track. The brown wire was then connected to 20C and then into the left side of the power track. To bring power to the breadboard, insert two AA batteries into the holder. Connect the positive and negative wires to the orange and yellow wires through the wire connector clip. The orange wire is connected to the positive wire (red) and the yellow wire is connected to the black wire (negative). Connect the orange wire to any plot along the positive column of the power track. Connect the yellow wire to any plot along the negative column of the power track. The LED should light up as it did during my run through, shown below. In the first image I added a resistor to 21F and 28H.

The two main issues that I had with this project were not having the hand crank piece (which can definitely happen as we've seen) and working with the circuit.

For the first problem, I recommend using a pair of strong pliers to turn the hand crank generator piece. That was the only way I was able to get it to finally light the LED up. However, this does not help when creating the turbine part of this project. For that, I can only say that you need to either replace the piece by ordering another kit or taking a hand crank from another machine. There is definitely an alternative that exists but I was unable to find one through my experimentation.

For the second issue, my main problem with the circuit was the mishmash of parts that I was dealing with. I was unable to purchase the breadboard kit at the beginning of the expedition so I was working with bits from old projects and many of the wires from the handheld generator kit were low quality and would not conduct electrical current.

Eventually I was able to make them work by soldering some of the wire ends and connecting them via the wire connector. If you don't have a soldering iron, you can twist and fold the ends over themselves and then feed them through the wire connector.

Check out this link, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GJ_0tmxNXM5WrYjqWQzOQAI6qwbd4J0za8ey11cuIg4/edit, for a look at How It Works, a build log of this project.