1 WIND MEASUREMENT
FOR EVERYBIKE
Our Slogan „Wind Measurement for Everybody” is what we want to do and has a double meaning within our team. It should be easy to use for every person and it should be useable for every body that moves in the real world. Athletes of all profession levels like to do sports in nature. And everybody who spends time in nature doing sports knows the feeling that the wind is always blowing in the wrong direction – namely against our moving direction. This is the feeling point of view. The point is: we cannot change the wind, and we also have our planned route. But if we don’t know the strength and direction of the wind during our sport activities, we have no chance to react in any way to the wind.
- Not with aerodynamic optimizations, because we don´t know for which boundary conditions, we have to optimize them.
- Not by taking a different route, because we don´t know the wind on the alternative route.
windpuls delivers the full range of wind information at the point of interest – it knows its speed, orientation and can transmit the pure wind and speed data to any kind of end-user device.
Our goal is to establish windpuls for athletes for their training purposes as well as for sport event organizers to ensure a fair competition by including the wind information of every athlete.
2 EXPERIENCE AND EXPERT
The team of windpuls is set up by experts in their field in the automotive industry and in sports. The founding team, consisting of
Mr. Christoph Feichtinger, who is an expert in aerodynamics and product development, and Mr. Klaus Bernkopf, an experienced manager and founder of start-up companies, are fully dedicated to developing windpuls to a must have for wind measurement in sports and mobility solutions. We furthermore work with an experienced partner company and experts in electronic development and manufacturing.
3 WHO NEEDS THIS?
There is currently no sensor on the market that gives direct wind information on any moving body. We have identified cycling, skiing and sailing athletes as potential main target customers for windpuls. Every discipline contains amateur and professional athletes as well as organizers of sport events.
4 HOW WE DO IT?
windpuls is a physical multisensor which combines kinematic measurements with windspeed and wind-direction measurements in one compact casing. The raw sensor data always stay within the casing and are merged on the internal microcontroller where the calculation of the sensor output is performed. The sensor has its own power supply with usb-C external charging connection.
The calculated output data is transmitted by various types of wireless communications like WLAN, Bluetooth LE or ANT+. The Sensor can be mounted via a “Go-Pro” Mount to any equipment such as a helmet or a bicycle.
5 USE CASES
Wind Measurement during Training
windpuls can be used by cyclists for training purposes. Therefore, windpuls is mounted in the front area of the bicycle and records the wind during the training ride. The sensor data are transferred via an ANT+ or Bluetooth LE wireless connection to the cycling computer or a smartphone. In combination with other recorded information, like cadence, heart rate, bike speed, climb and eventually the measured pedal power the local wind information from windpuls can be analysed during or after the training.
The Wind is actually not included in any analysis of cyclists although it has a tremendous effect on the cycling performance. Taking a well-trained hobby cyclist, an average pedal power of 450W leads to a speed on the flat of ~44 km/h, while for a climb of 8% the maximum reachable speed is reduced by the half. A headwind of 20km/h, which is not recorded nowadays but can be a quite realistic scenario, can reduce the reachable speed to approx. 30km/h.
Like KOM (King of the Mountain) Rankings in Online platforms like Strava we plan to generate a KAW (King against the Wind) Ranking.
Market/Users: hobby cyclists, professional rider, data analysts, sport technology institutes
Wind Map (Online, Historical)
windmap can be used to generate online wind maps of roadway networks. Therefore, existing online platforms like Strava or Garmin Connect can be extended by an additional wind-layer. This additional wind information can be used in general to identify critical wind locations (always heavy side wind, wind gusts, …) and to plan a wind-optimal route. A wind-optimal route could mean a route which gives the lowest additional air resistance due to the knowledge of long-term and actual head- and sidewind for the planned route. In the best case, also the effect of sailing could be included in predicting a low energy consumption route.
On the other hand, for the highly motivated athlete, he or she could search for the most exhausting routes in the wind map.
windmap gives additional information about local weather conditions in terms of temperature and air-humidity/precipitation. This information is an added value to any map content provider. For the use of windmap as pure map content collector the data can be stored whether on a cycling computer or on a different end-user device like a smartphone. All this data cannot be delivered by permanently installed wind- and weather stations that are in use at the moment.
With windpuls mounted on the bicycle the whole road is covered with wind information, while permanently wind measurement stations just give local snapshots.
Only windpuls delivers the real wind information in the real height for roadside vehicles.
Market/Users: hobby cyclists, professional rider, data analysts, sport technology institutes, sport equipment provider
Monitoring for sport Event organizers
Athletes in professional sport events like the IRONMAN in Hawaii have long recognized that the wind is a crucial part for the cycling event. But not just the environmental wind, also the wake of preceding vehicles or competitors could be used for drafting. There is no measurement device available in the market that allows to control if the cyclist is in a slipstream and how big the effect is. Therefore, 10m the organizers and governing body of the IRONMAN introduced the so-called slipstream “control” box to create and maintain a fair competition.
Any ride within the slipstream control box is punished with a time penalty. The problem is, that this rule is hard to control and leads to questionable decisions regarding legality. Therefore, we propose to use windpuls on every bike to measure the slipstream effect on the bike and use this information to ensure a fair competition. Furthermore, windpuls gives information about the strength of the slip stream effect which can be used to calculate wind/slipstream penalties. Similar, they use such wind relevant rules in ski-jumping competitions since many years.
windpuls could be also used for ski-jumping events on the helmet of every athlete to calculate the wind points with the local wind information instead of using the average tangential windspeed information of the permanently mounted wind measurement units. This permanently installed units are too far away from the real point of interest, which is the athlete itself.
windpuls gives the wind information at the point of interest – the rider / athlete – and ensures thereby a fair competition.
Market/Users: organizer of all sport events where wind plays a crucial rule for the fairness of the competition. Cycling Races, IRONMAN, Ski-jumping, Golf, …