i have seen and read lots of posts on these forums about how to measure the amount of power being used (by an appliance, by an entire house, etc), but i must confess to being a bit of a newbie to some of this and i had what i think is a related, but different, question.
what hardware would be required to measure the amount of power being generated by something? for instance, if you had a hand crank that someone could turn vigorously, what would the setup look like if you wanted to report something like '2 kilowatts generated' or whatever?
it seems like if you could convert the motion to electricity, there would be a way to measure the current and duration of electricity flowing across a circuit, but it is slightly over my head. i do have some experience with circuits and small motors, but my simple mind cant quite visualize how this would all work.
any ideas would be most appreciated! thanks!
UPDATE: something like the 'Youngblood Power Monitor' about 1/4 down this page (
http://www.pedalpowergenerator.com/how-to-build-a-bicyle-generator-free-power.html) is what i was thinking - i can write the software to display/plot the data, but i was wondering how to build a circuit to measure the power (amps/volts/watts/watt-hours).
