Here’s something I recently managed to get to a publishable state: https://github.com/xird/wsp-laneguide
Before we go to “What is it, and why should I care?”, we need some background.
There are people who, for reasons known only to themselves, regularly throw themselves at the planet from any aircraft where they manage to open the door during flight. We call these people skydivers.
These days, quite a few of them wear contraptions of nylon strapped around their bodies, with wings extending between their legs and under their arms. These people we call wingsuit pilots.
And a small number of these people, instead of flocking with their friends in the sky and practising aerobatics, choose to follow Jonathan Livingston Seagull in trying to fly faster(and farther, and sometimes slower). These are the wingsuit performance competitors, for whom the device discussed in this post is meant.
In Wingsuit Performance competitions, each competitor flies solo. There are three events:
- Speed – Flying as fast as possible horizontally
- Distance – Covering as much horizontal distance as possible
- Time – Falling as slowly as possible
Weather permitting, three rounds of each event are jumped, for a total of nine jumps. The jumps are judged based on data recorded by a GPS logger. For a few good reasons, competitors are expected to fly along a designated flight path. These reasons include:
- All the competitors flying in the same direction ensures a fair competition
- Having all or most of the competitors land on the designated drop zone is far less hassle than trying to collect jumpers scattered across the countryside
- And most importantly: Keeping competitors in their own lanes drastically reduces the risk of collisions – which can be deadly
Unfortunately, an efficient body position for flying a wingsuit does not allow one to look where one is going. The usual technique for staying in one’s lane is to memorize landmarks along the flight path and navigate based on them. This works most of the time, but when it doesn’t, competitors can (and will) drift outside their designated lanes. This is the problem the WSP Laneguide is designed to solve.
There are already several similar implementations in use on the competition circuit, but here’s another one – hopefully documented well enough that anyone who wants to try it can build their own.
The unit consists of a 3D-printed enclosure:
Inside are some electronics:
There’s a rudimentary user interface:
And finally, a 5-LED strip that can be mounted in the competitor’s helmet:
The “reference points” (the endpoints of the designated flight paths) are pre-programmed into the device. Before the jump, the competitor selects the correct reference point. During the jump, they don’t need to move their head to see where to go – the LED display guides them toward the centerline of the designated flight path and toward the reference point.
For more technical details and instructions on how to build and use your own, see the public GitHub repository where all the necessary information is published.