Snow skiing looks easy, right? You just stay standing, and gravity does the work. The reality is that skiing is difficult for beginners to learn. [19mkarpawich] loves to ski, but he was frustrated seeing crying kids on skis along with screaming parents trying to coach them. Inspired by wearable electronics, he took an Arduino, an old jacket, some LEDs, and created Ski Buddy.
The brains in the jacket consist of an Adafruit Flora, accelerometer, and a battery pack. Conductive thread connects to LED sequins. The jacket can help teach linking turns, parallel skiing, hockey stops, and gradual pizza stopping. In addition to the build details and some notes on where not to place sensors (doubtlessly learned the hard way), [19mkarpawich] also does a detailed explanation of the software and how to use the jacket.
You can see a very short video demonstration of Ski Buddy below. We’ve seen more wearables lately, some of them pretty creative. Maybe it is time to learn how to sew if you can’t already.
I pity the kid trying to learn to ski on a surface as bad as that. We used to keep old skis called rock bashers for Spring conditions, and the runs were no place for novices.
If you french fry when you should pizza, you’re gonna have a bad time.