Experiment in Green Energy with inauspicious start

[bolson]

Sometimes I think it would be cool to work on making windmills for cheap sustainable energy generation. The part of this it seems to make sense to me to start tinkering with this is alternator design. I finally bought an oscilloscope (USB oscilloscope, software display, Linux/Mac friendly) so that I could measure my progress. It came today, and I measured what I get from waving the magnets I have past a coil of wire I wound, and I'm barely above the background noise 60Hz hum that my coil seems very adept at picking up. Boo. But, thanks to getting my high school physics refreshed at Khan Academy, I know that the energy generated is proportional to ((the length of wire exposed to magnetic field) * (the strength of the magnetic field) * (the speed of the wire moving through the field)). So, there are the things to scale up. Onward!