When you think anemometer, you probably don’t think “load cell” — but (statistically speaking) you probably don’t live in Hurricane Country, which is hard on wind-speed-measuring-whirligigs. When [BLANCHARD Jordan] got tired of replacing professionally-made meteorological eggbeaters, he decided he needed something without moving parts. Whatever he came up with would probably qualify for the Component Abuse Challenge, but the choice of load cells of all things to measure wind speed? Yeah, that’s not what the manufacturer intended them for.In retrospect, it’s actually a fairly obvious solution: take a plate of known area, and you’re going to get a specific force at a given air speed. The math isn’t hard, it’s just not how we normally see this particular measurement done. Of course, a single plate would have to be pivoted to face the wind for an accurate reading, which means moving parts– something specifically excluded from the design brief. [Jordan] instead uses a pair of load cells, mounted 90 degrees to one another, for his anemometer. One measures the force in a north-south axis, and the other east-west, allowing him to easily calculate both wind speed and direction. In theory, that is. Unfortunately, he vibe coded the math with ChatGPT, and it looks like it doesn’t track direction all that well. The vibe code runs on an ESP32 is responsible for polling data, tossing outliers, and zeroing out the load cells on the regular.The red lines are from the load-cell equipped weather station; the blue is from a commercial model by Davis. Everything but direction tracks pretty well.If you’re feeling forgiving towards abominable intelligence, the problem might not be code, but could potentially be related to the geometry of the wind-catchers. To catch the wind coming from any angle, instead of a flat plate, a series of angled circular vanes are used, as you can see from the image.Given that arrangement is notably not symmetrical, that might be what throws off the direction reading. Still, the wind speed measurements are in very good agreement with known-good readings. The usual rotating bird perch doesn’t measure direction either, so this solid-state replacement should be just as good.If you like the idea of hacking components to do something the designer never intended, the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge runs until November 11th — just don’t wait until the 11th hour, because entries close at 10 AM Pacific.