I know many of you have read about the piezo electric tree...
Good idea used to capture wind.
My idea is we could possibly do this cheap with the use of rochelle salt and thin yet flappy clear plastic sheets like for the overhead projector ... The sell glue that is conductive to repair solder joints at think geek here is the idea ...
Get some over head projector sheets:
http://www.duall.com/store/product/107174.107174/overhead-projector-polyester-film-box-of-50-sheets.html (http://www.duall.com/store/product/107174.107174/overhead-projector-polyester-film-box-of-50-sheets.html)
Get some rochelle salt http://www.enasco.com/product/SB07875M (http://www.enasco.com/product/SB07875M)
Get some conductive glue http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/b70c/ (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/b70c/)
get some baking soda from your local supermart
follow directions here http://www.seawhy.com/xlroch.html
and here http://www.seawhy.com/xlseed.html
Instead of seeding with a string we will seed the crystal with our overhead plastic sheeting so that we get a good but thin layer of crystal on our overhead sheet.
Once we have our layer on both sides of the overhead sheet we will use wire glue and solar tabbing to both sides of the sheet as well.
Then we will sandwich this with a sheet on top and a sheet on the bottom and let it dry.
Once dry we will let sheet flap in the wind use a hunk of steel as a ground and see what kind of voltage and current we can obtain from 1 8x10 sheet covered in this material.
I am curious to see the results of this but I leave this idea out the in open source for people to try.
the surface should be completely conductive on both sides sandwiched between two other non conductive sheets should generate power at every movement how much power will this generate though? Test it find out I leave this project for open source.
This product is open source any other variations of this device I expect or add on to this device to be complete public knowledge I ask not for money just that you share your results and improvements with the general public.
Actually the "tree" concept is not very good or practicle. It has been calculated that each leaf would generate around 1 picowatt of energy. The tree would have to have 1 million leaves to produce 1 watt.