Vavuud Wind Meter For Smartphones Contains No Electronics, Delivers Accurate Ground Wind Speed Readings

From TechCrunch:

Smartphones have a lot of on-board sensors, but do they really have enough? No way, say a slew of recent hardware startups, of which Danish Vavuud is only the most recent. Vavuud is turning to Kickstarter to help build a smartphone-compatible wind meter, one that miraculously contains no electronics and yet still can communicate accurate wind speed measurements wirelessly to iPhones and Galaxy devices.

The Vavuud wind meter provides an easy way to measure wind speed exactly where you are, with a device that's remarkably inexpensive and deceptively simple. It plugs into the headphone jack of your device, but that's to give it a stable base; it actually uses two magnets in the rotor, which generate a magnetic field that the smartphone can pick up and process using algorithms normally used for sound processing to translate it to wind speed data. Vavuud co-founder Thomas P. Helms says it's been tested with iPhone 4, 4S, and 5, as well as Galaxy SII and SIII so far, and it has been calibrated in a wind tunnel at the University of Denmark to ensure accuracy.

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