So, tell me what you think!

All right,

This was fun. To know how you guys think was pretty cool. I guess I was not quite clear about my intention after all. What my concern was from the first point is safety. And it was really interesting that many of you rejected the idea of having another safety measure only because of safety.

Let's take it from here. We spend a lot of money on our gear for our safety and ease of climb. We, say, upgrade our grigris to grigri 2 in order to make sure we have a better gear (not all of us actually do that, but i think we all agree that the mentality is there and so many climbers follow that). but it turns out that it's a failure and it could kill us. At the same time we resist another side of the technology to help us to stay safe. why is that? again, we are not talking about iphone apps. we are talking about a device in your backpack that can help us when need it. and of course we all have our share of brain. otherwise why would we become rock climbers? ;)

We already have blood meters for diabetics to measure the sugar level in their blood, and clip-ons to measure oxygen saturation, too.

We need a gadget to measure hydration level. A lot of folks don't know when they are getting thirsty.

I'm always seeing folks skip their drinking because they're too busy or focused. Even the pros.

I tend to over-compensate. That's not a problem, but in fact I don't know when I'm drinking more or less than I need, or if I'm simply mis-managing my resources and time.

Also it might be useful to have an electrolyte meter. This simply confuses me.

Ok, I'll take a shot. I think that Laser rangefinders are missing from rock climbing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_rangefinder

Have you ever stood at the base of a route looking up while wondering exactly how far away certain points of the climb were?

If you had a Laser rangefinder, you could just point it at the anchors at the top of the pitch and it would shoot you back an accurate distance. Now, you don't have to entertain the question of "Is my rope long enough for this pitch?" or "Will I be able to lower off safely from there?"

Another use of this could be measuring possible falling potential between bolts. For example, you could measure the distance between the first and second bolts to determine if you would have the possibility of decking if you blew the 2nd clip.

I just think having these bits of info BEFORE you climb a route would better prepare you for some possible dangers you could come across while on the wall.

Have you ever stood at the base of a route looking up while wondering exactly how far away certain points of the climb were?

Ok, I'll bite...

Here's an idea. No I would not use it. I probably would not buy it (at least not admit to having bought it), but the geeky grear-wanker in me would stop and think "hey, cool!"

Imagine a small device that you could attach to a pulley, ATC or biner, that you feed your rope through. The device measures the lenght of rope pulled through it and can be set to alert at half length, 10m left, 3m left etc.
No more guesstimating the length of rope left in your neat coils or chaotic heap, happy joy joy.

But now for bonus geekery points, the device also has a wireless communication with a similar device carried by the leader, so that even the leader knows exactly how much rope there is left.
No more "Oi, Chris how much rope?" "Dunno.. twenty feet" "What?" "TWENTY!" followoed by "SLACK!!!" "YO'RE OUT OF ROPE!" "SLACK DAMNIT!" "No can do, waitaminute, just DON'T FALL RIGHT NOW!" echoing all over the crag.


Ok, remember where you heard about it first :)

And how does your device know how long your rope is in the first place - especially after you have chopped off a damaged 10' end, and/or swapped ropes with the group next store.

You could run the entire rope through the device each time before you do a pitch. In fact you could spend all day booting up. charging, recalibrating and synching your gadgets and never touch rock it all. Electronics will have saved another life.

No that has never occurred to me because I dont need to have a phone tell me if my rope is safe, I have a brain to do that. Also, its the sheath, not the shield.

Aready available. We use a small 3-axis acceleration data logger ( about half the size of a cigarette lighter) from a Swiss company called MSI for development work. You download the data onto a PC later but obviously it can´t work out the fall factor because it can´t measure the rope lengths, you can see how far the fall was though from the time plot.

And here I thought fall factors were supposed to be a gauge of impact forces and not fall length.

Only in a simplistic world!