Finally, a Wireless Skate Speedometer, so now you can know how fast you’re skating. As an added bonus, it’s water resistant at up to 30ft/10m, for when you accidentally skate into a swimming pool.
You have to turn it on and off, because the batteries will only last 300hrs. I can’t imagine that would be hard to do, given where the wheel is – on the bottom of your shoe. And heaven help you if you forget, two weeks later your speedo will be knackered.
Of course, the wheels and bearings wear out, but they thought of that. Just buy your wheels and bearings from them! An electronics company! They’ll also sell you a battery kit, I guess because it uses special batteries or something. Or perhaps because they know you’re going to forget to turn the darn thing off.
They’ve got a big write-up on their site about how pushbikes have the wheel in contact with the ground all the time, but skates don’t, so their computer has to do all sorts of tricks to figure out the right answer. Perhaps hooking up a GPS might have been a better idea?
And of course, you have to consider the privacy implications or wireless transmission of personal data like your velocity…
I cannot imagine that being even remotely accurate. As a software developer, I know that just because they call their software ‘advanced’, it’s not sufficiently indistinguishable from magic to be able to handle all the variables in skating.
They talk about analysing your skating style. But what are they calibrating against? How do they handle the different style you have when skating upwind/downwind?
Plus you generally buy your wheels in a set so that they wear at a similar pace. You want (as far as possible) to have all wheels evenly in contact with the ground. If the ‘long lasting, durable’ wheel is too hard you’re going to end up skating on just that wheel, if it’s too soft, it’ll never hit the ground!
Someone here at work suggested accelerometers might be involved / a better idea, but I don’t know how you’d get a decent level of accuracy out of them.
Also the acceleration isn’t always in the same direction as the velocity you’re trying to measure depending on the angle of your skate, so that’d be another complication.