Snowboarders get ready, your board is about to get a whole lot smarter. Cerevo launched the XON SNOW-1 at CES Unveiled tonight and the board will ship later in 2015. Learning to snowboard a painful experience, you’re going to fall down, a lot. Even once you get comfortable with riding, there’s a good chance you could improve at a much faster rater if you knew where you were going wrong.
The SNOW-1 adds sensors to your board to monitor your input to the board to ensure it’s where it should be.
The board is still very much in prototype stage with loose wires definitely not ready for the snowfield, but the company is hopeful mid year may tell a different story.
You can connect XON device with a smartphone easily via Bluetooth 4.0, and then track the data in real time which are visualized in the app. You can get the tips to improve your riding from it in real time by reading the data yourself or sending it to your coach. The data comes from the weight balance of your right and left foot, the center of gravity position, the top-side bend tail-side bend and acceleration.
There’s some LED’s on the front and rear of each of the bindings, and at first I thought these were just to look cool (they do). Instead these are designed to give you immediate visual feedback in the real world. Let’s hope they enable advanced riders to customise them for other purposes, like achieving speed or height over jumps, much like reaching your walking goals with a fitbit.
The visuals on the software are really well done, it’s one thing to have an excel spreadsheet of the raw data output from sensors, but you can give that to real people, they need visuals and Cerevo has done a great job here.
More information at https://xon.cerevo.com/en/