A Kickstarter success has just closed its seed funding round, raising $375,000 to continue its work of measuring the wind using a network of smartphones with a low-cost, electronics-free hardware accessory combined with a mobile app. Danish startup Vaavud‘s new funding comes from a group of angel investors, and according to Vaavud CEO Thomas Helms, it’ll help them expand at a faster… Read More
Not all of us really pay any attention to the local weather report, but I am quite sure that mom’s actually give a damn – especially those who do not own a dryer, and would need the help of the scorching sun to dry those hand washed clothes out in the open, while a windy day too, would be more than welcome to aid in the evaporation process. However, if you are a curious monkey and want to get one of the weirder accessories for your smartphone, it might be worth the shot to give the Vaavud wireless wind meter a go. The Vaavud wireless wind meter is capable of hooking up to most of the other smartphones around, where it is capable of taking measurements of your environment. Completely free of any kind of electronics, it has been specially tested and calibrated in a wind tunnel at The Technical University of Denmark.
Just what does the Vaavud wireless wind meter offers wind-dependent outdoor enthusiasts like kitesurfers, paragliders, and sailors? Well, they will be able to enjoy the relevant and important information required so that one can best plan the next adventure. Chris Johnson, Founder of BiteMyApple.co., shared “Unlike most weather apps, Vaavud can give you an accurate wind measurement using your iOS or Android phone for a specific location. This one-of-a-kind tool takes the guess work out of trip planning. Like all great products, you can share this information online, and check out live wind readings from other users on an interactive map.”
The Vaavud is capable of measuring wind speeds of up to 25 metre per second, and not only that, knowing that those who pick it up will more often than not be of the adventurous sort, which is why it has also been specially built to be resistant to water, sand, and dirt among others. As we mentioned earlier, the Vaavud’s revolutionary design contains no electronics at all, which makes it all the more durable and hardy. It will play nice with all iOS devices, the Samsung Galaxy S2, S3I, and S4, retailing for $44.99 a pop.
Press Release
[ Vaavud wireless wind meter copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
It’s always nice to see a Kickstarter project make it through to reality—and this is a neat one. Vaavud, an inexpensive wind meter that was funded on Kickstarter earlier this year, is finally available to buy.
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Kickstarter success Vaavud is a thing of beauty. Created by a Danish team of enterprising inventors, it plugs into your iPhone or Android device’s headphone jack and connects with an app to tell you the current wind speed. It uses no power, and actually talks wirelessly to your phone via the built-in magnetic field sensor that ships with modern smartphones.
The Vaavud is shipping as of July 30, and goes on sale at bitemyapple, Grand St. and other fine purveyors of gadgets and gizmos, but I got a chance to test one out early. The Vaavud blew through its tests in fact (see what I did there?) and definitely told me how fast the wind outside was, or how effectively I was blowing on the thing when trying it out for my own amusement indoors. Which I did plenty, because it’s very fun.
The Vaavud ships with an internal mechanism that works with most smartphones out of the box, and a kit to change it over to handle the Samsung Galaxy S2, which requires a slightly different design. It also comes with a soft carrying pouch complete with carabiner, since this thing is designed to be carted with you as you scale mountains or brave rapids.
You can use the Vaavud with the app created by the company itself, but third-party apps are also supported, starting with the first to leverage the API, Weendy. That app is about crowdsourcing weather conditions, and draws from people using Vaavud around the world to build wind speed profiles of locales. It’s the perfect integration, but as Vaavud is pretty niche, don’t go expecting a lot of that data to pop up for most spots just yet.
Data seems to be accurate, but it’s hard to compare as I don’t have any other kind of wind meter technology nearby to compare it to. The charts produced by the native Vaavud app are attractive and easy to read, and the fact that no batteries are required is pretty awesome in terms of using it in outdoor and remote locales where it’s probably most useful. At €40.00 (roughly $61 U.S.) it’s a little pricey for a novelty, but anyone conducting environmental research or just really keen on weather will definitely get a kick out of it.
A lot of Kickstarter projects, both successful and not, aim at a particular niche; it’s part of the reason they aren’t good candidates for traditional funding channels. The Vaavud is likely going to appeal to a small segment of the population, but unlike most Kickstarter projects, it’s smartly executed, well-built and elegantly designed. If you think you need a Vaavud, don’t hesitate to go ahead and get one.
Smartphones have a lot of on-board sensors, but do they really have enough? No way, say a slew of recent hardware startups, of which Danish Vavuud is only the most recent. Vavuud is turning to Kickstarter to help build a smartphone-compatible wind meter, one that miraculously contains no electronics and yet still can communicate accurate wind speed measurements wirelessly to iPhones and Galaxy devices.
The Vavuud wind meter provides an easy way to measure wind speed exactly where you are, with a device that’s remarkably inexpensive and deceptively simple. It plugs into the headphone jack of your device, but that’s to give it a stable base; it actually uses two magnets in the rotor, which generate a magnetic field that the smartphone can pick up and process using algorithms normally used for sound processing to translate it to wind speed data. Vavuud co-founder Thomas P. Helms says it’s been tested with iPhone 4, 4S, and 5, as well as Galaxy SII and SIII so far, and it has been calibrated in a wind tunnel at the University of Denmark to ensure accuracy.
“To our knowledge we are the first to use the magnetometer in smartphones in this way, so we of course think the technology itself is kind of cool,” Helms explained via email. “It’s also cool because on a mechanical level it appears quite simple, but there is some relatively complex math behind it .”
It’s likely that Vavuud will be able to work with any modern advanced smartphone with built-in magnetic field sensors (which is pretty much all of them), so the limited existing test pool shouldn’t frighten away potential backers. The Vavuud is designed to be used by anyone who might find accurate current windspeed readings useful – a potential group of users that includes windsurfers, sailors, paragliders, model plane pilots and more.
“Surfers, sailors, paragliders etc. have needed an online anemometer for ages to be able to create and share crowd-sourced wind information,” Helms explained. “Because conditions at your favorite spots may depend on very local factors like mountains, could be affected by thermal conditions, and on and on.”
Vavuud is looking to ship the Wind Meter by June of this year, with pre-orders beginning at the £15 level. iOS and Android apps from Vavuud itself are expected to become available at the same time, but it’s easy to imagine how, as with the Thermodo, the developer community might embrace another means of collecting information about the world around you and integrate Vavuud into their own apps.
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