Ya, it's a pretty cool concept! I had a nice chat with the engineer who has spent the last 2 years developing the device. It's designed for kiteboarding or wakeboarding and other aeral sports, with multiple accelerometers and GPS units. As I recall, The GPS units are 1hz, i.e., 1 ping to the sattelites per second. The accelerometers are primarily used for determining number of rotaions (for spin and flip tricks) and it does do some very cool stuff for tracking your path on a wakeboard or kiteboard.

As far as waterskiing goes, I can't say that I've had an opportunity to try it. I do know that from speaking with the engineer at length, it's not exactly designed or optimized for the speeds we're achieving through the slalom course. I do not believe that it will show a completely accurate path (it may show your track inside the buoy, instead of outside) and with only 1 ping to the sattelite per second, (or two, if you count both gpses) you're only looking at 30-40 tracking points over the length of the course. That's 6 or maybe 7 points per buoy.

Is it cool? Absolutely. Will it give you some information on what you're line looks like from overhead? Yes. Is it exactly what we're looking for as skiers? Probably not. Is it worth the $$? If you have wakeboarders who would use it to, absolutely.

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There's no out-of-the-box solution yet. The shadowbox is the closest thing yet. I have some other technology I'm working on that should be more precise...

Clearly.

Hey you guys should check out Ripxx. It is about the size of a palm, Ripxx is shaped for users’ hands and it can also be easily strapped to the leg or waist. Ripxx features a GPS tracker which can send 10 tracking signals every second during users’ training, e.g. running or skiing. Besides, the device also has three built in accelerometers and three gyroscopes. With these sensors, users can continually record their practice data such as position, acceleration, speed, vertical drop, rolls, spins, turn, orientation and altitude. The data will thence be transferred into a computer via a USB
cable for translating into various forms of analysis, e.g. charts, 3D models, graphs, etc. Analysts also can plot or overlay the users’ movements onto a map to retrace their route and location. This will help for instance mountain bikers to analyze their weaknesses in certain tracks.

Below is a summary of what Ripxx can measure:

    * Elapsed time of run
    * Time of day run was made
    * Run distance
    * Top speed as well as average speed.
    * Top acceleration and average acceleration
    * Distance, height and air time on jumps
    * Roll rate (how quickly you execute spins)
    * Roll count (how many times you execute a roll)
    * Vertical drop from any two points
    * Steepest part of run
    * Number of runs on the same track
    * Number of tracks at the same location





Check out the Website at www.ripxx.com