— PROJECT NAME
SP1 Snow Profiler
— ROLE
Mechanical Engineer
UX Designer
Testing
Branding
Graphic Design
— DATE
Summer 2014
Mountain Hub is the first global real-time network for the outdoors that pulls together a fragmented data landscape into a single platform. Mountain Hub’s hardware products collect snowpack structure data to determine if an avalanche is possible.
I was the first engineer to join the product team back when it was 3 founders, a proof of concept, and a vision. I worked with the co-founders to bring their proof of concept to a manufactured product before the company was rebranded as Mountain Hub. When I started no one on the product team had experience manufacturing products in China, but we figured it out as we threw ourselves in the deep end of product development.
The Problem
Current snowpack analysis methods are time consuming and tiring. A skier or scientist must dig a pit down into the snow and poke the layers with various thickness objects like their fist, fingers, pen, or knife. The hardness is correlated with the size of the object. As you can imagine this is a subjective, time consuming process. Our goal was to provide skiers with another tool to quickly and easily test the snowpack under their feet. The SP1 and SCOPE replaced a 45 minute process with a 20 second test that could be seamlessly shared with other skiers.
SP2
With the successful launch of the SP1 we took the learnings from intense field testing and customer feedback to redesign parts of the SP1 to create the SP2. We added another optical depth sensor to the pole, made the force sensor larger, improved the GPS accuracy, and updated the graphics
