Piepser: A Smart Wrist-Worn Variometer To Maximize The Paragliders Flytime.

The goal or the motivation for paraglider pilots is to stay as long in the air as possible. Therefore paraglider pilots are always searching for thermal upwinds that allow them to gain altitude. These thermal lifts are difficult to detect as we cannot see them with our eyes and we can only feel the vertical acceleration but not the vertical speed with our body. Therefore devices which indicate the vertical speed (so called Variometers) are widely used among paraglider pilots. The main goal for this paper is to design and to implement a low-power, low-cost and wearable variometer with a minimal formfactor but long lifetime, which can display and indicate the vertical velocity. Experimental results show a power consumption of 6.27mW at full load. We managed to achieve a price point of 30.2 CHF per unit and a device volume of 47x47x25 [mm] at a weight of 43 grams. The wearable variometer is designed around the novel Ambiq Apollo2 microcontroller, a commercial high accuracy MEMS sensor and includes a software Kalman filter.